Robert Muchamore, The General Review

Overall Rating

The only good point is that we get another glimpse into Cherub life, however the writing involving the main characters is just too shallow and cartoon-like to provide much more of an insight into their personalities.

The story starts of tense and gripping, then limps through a tedious plot twist to a "jumped the shark" ending. Very, very disappointing.

Robert Muchamore is an author who always delivers - until now! The first in the Cherub series, The Recruit, had me hooked from the start on the adventures of child spy James Adams and his sister, Lauren. No other spy books - Alex Rider, Young James Bond, Jimmy Coates etc - could touch Cherub for quality, excitement or pure enjoyment.
However, I feel very let down by The General. Much of Muchamore's talent comes from creating believable and likeable characters, characters you invest your emotions in - characters you come to care about. In The General, however, he dwells less on the people and more on the action. His characters become cartoon-like, one-dimensional - with no real depth to them.

The story within The General is also sadly lacking. Although the book enjoys a tense and exciting opening chapter, it rapidly descends into a fiasco of plot, involving plans to rob a Las Vegas casino using MI5 spying equipment and "fighting dirty" in a tedious training exercise. Like another reviewer said, the series really does jump the shark here.

The success of the Cherub series, for me, was that you could 'just about' believe that a spy school for orphan kids was plausible - as crooks would certainly be less wary of kids than adults. However, I found much of the plot of The General - especially that of a teacher plotting with James to commit theft on a grand scale - just too ridiculous to swallow. Perhaps Muchamore is running out of ideas, perhaps he was working to a tight deadline and had to rush things. Whatever the problem, this book is certainly the weakest link in the Cherub chain.

I expected much, much more of Muchamore - but the hype surrounding the release of this book turned out to be much ado about nothing!