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cloudyskies-starryheavens · 2 months ago

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The Boy Who Knew Everything

by Victoria Forester

Basic Info

Book 2 of Piper McCloud Year published: 2015 Page Length: 404 Genre: Fantasy Goodreads Link

Personal Info

Dates Read: 11/26/24-12/4/24 Read or Listened to?: Listened to How many times have I read this book before?: 0

Plot Summary (Spoiler Free)

Piper McCloud and her gaggle of extraordinary kids are back! After growing bored of trying to be normal, Piper and her friends team up to become a group of young superheroes! But the evil they're fighting and their fellow gifted people may not be everything they seem . . . .

Overall Impression

Much like the first book in this series, I was expecting to not be super into this book. The first book was surprisingly good and had an interesting cliff hanger, but after waiting over a year to get my hands on the sequel, I wasn't exactly excited to read this one. However, I was pleasantly surprised! In my opinion, this book is even better than the first one! Despite not being very strong in the beginning, the story eventually begins to ramp up by exploring the lore and the inner workings of Piper's best friend, Conrad. This book was excellent conceptually and overall a fun read!

Full spoiler review under the cut!

Plot Notes:

Character Notes: Piper: - Bio: Piper is the titular character from The Girl Who Could Fly. Being the only girl with special powers in a conservative southern US town can be a struggle, but Piper never lets it get her down! Piper was the protagonist of the first book, but takes more of a backseat in this book. So the deuteragonist? - How I Feel About Her: Piper is pretty cute, she works alright as a main character. She's not my favorite character to follow around, but she's overall a good kid and a great friend. I suppose most of her arc was done in the first book.

Conrad: - Bio: Conrad is the titular character as The Boy Who Knew Everything. He's a super-genius 13 year old who was able to hack into government satellites by the age of 5, and was disowned by his politician father for doing so. After escaping the Institute with Piper and their friends, Conrad now lives on the farm with Piper's family. He is our protagonist for this book. - How I Feel About Him: I really like Conrad in this book. He's easily the most complex character in the whole series. I love listening to him talk, seeing his thought process as he problem solves, and I love seeing him struggle!

What I Liked/What Worked: I loved the concept and the execution of this book, mostly of the latter half. The plot is pretty complex with a lot of various points (I just had to write out a little timeline for myself so I don't forget all the stuff that went down in this book), but for me, that's what makes this book. Not to mention how naturally the story flows. It's just such a well written book, and I can feel how much time and thought and creativity was put into it! Conrad is also just a great character, and I'm glad that we're getting more of him in this book. He goes through an arc of his own. Conrad's father is a famous, popular senator who runs for president and wins. After becoming the president, Conrad's father publicly announces Conrad's death, even though both of them are well aware that Conrad is still alive. This sends Conrad into a depression, and he spends some time sickly and apathetic. I thought this was actually a great portrayal of depression. I also appreciated the way Piper's family treated him during this time, and I just thought, overall, that it was a good portrayal of a common mental health issue. Conrad is able to get himself out of this bout of depression after rediscovering his love of invention and helping people. But yeah, overall I just love Conrad's character. He's super smart and very kind, even if he can be a little closed off from others at times. And I love his friendship with Piper, they're super cute together and a great team. My other absolute favorite part of this book was the character (and big bad villain), Max. We meet Max for the first time in Xanthia, which is this magic village somewhere in the mountains where only people with gifts (like Piper and her friends) can live. Xanthia, on the surface, seems to be a paradise for Piper and Conrad after growing up in a world that did not accept them for their extraordinary powers. But Xanthia has their own problems. Max appears to be a regular teenager living in Xanthia. He kind of becomes a friend to Conrad for a little bit, until later we find out that he's been the mastermind behind everything that's been going bad throughout the story. So he's this vampire-like immortal creature who feeds off of the suffering of humanity. And his goal in life is to cause as much pain as possible because 1. He's seen everything after being alive for thousands of years and deals with constant boredom, 2. He needs it to survive, and 3. He's a total sadistic psychopath. Max's story is just so fascinating to me. And we also find out that he's the leader of Xanthia since he's the oldest. Anyways, Xanthia is almost completely corrupt. My favorite part was listening to their societal ideals and being able to draw perfect lines between Xanthia and cult behaviors. They're a relatively small group completely isolated from the outside world, they whole-heartedly believe that everything from the outside is evil and bad, and they're not allowed to have ideas that conflict with the status quo. It was pretty fascinating! I also just went through another one of my horror movie phases where I ended up watching a couple cult-centric horror movies (The Endless, Midsommar, Hereditary, and The Empty Man), and I've also watched quite a few hours of analysis videos talking about these movies and the cults that are discussed within them. So it was kind of cool for me to see that stuff portrayed in a kids book without being directly called out as being a cult. Yeah, overall the story of Max and Xanthia and the overarching conspiracy absolutely made this book for me, and Max is easily one of the most compelling antagonists I've seen in a book as of late. It's just spectacular.

What I Didn't Like/What Didn't Work: Alright, let's get into what didn't work for me (although there isn't much!) The biggest thing for me is just how boring the side kids are. I'm sitting here and for the life of me, I can't remember any of their names aside from the ones I saw just skimming back through the book to fact check myself. I really think this book suffers from what many other books and movies suffer from, which is having too many characters and not knowing how to juggle them all properly. I want to say there are 11 kids in the group? It's just too many for me to keep track of, and I think the author struggles as well. Each of them has a sort of one-note personality as well as their own special power (telekinesis, shrinking, super strength, x-ray vision, etc). I just feel that it would work much better if we just had fewer characters. Now, I will say that it does make sense in the context of the last book for there to be so many of them. If I remember the first book correctly, I thought that there being so many powered kids worked pretty well. In the first book, Piper goes to this institute for gifted kids where they try to get the kids to be normal, and it more or less functions as a regular boarding school (except with a little more torture). So there being an actual class worth of kids worked out, and I really liked how they were each able to pitch in and use their abilities to escape from the Institution. The whole thing worked out pretty well in that story. In this story, however, all the kids team up to be a super hero group, and personally, that was my least favorite plot line. A lot of people in reviews I've read compared this series to X-Men (my favorite was "the infant X-Men"). I haven't seen much in terms of the X-Men myself, but I get the gist. Anyhow, I just felt like that was the weakest part of the story for me. I usually try to think of how I would have done it differently if I was writing this book. I suppose at the end of the last book, everyone has gone off to live their own lives and more or less try to reassimilate back into society as normal kids. But then all of them decide that they dislike that and come to live with Piper's family on the farm. Maybe some of the kids would have decided that they like living on the outside? Maybe we could use that as an excuse to write a few of the original characters out? And then we can keep some of the more interesting ones around to stay with the main story? Overall it's not a huge complaint of mine, the story still works. And the super hero rescue scenes can be cool with how they all use their powers to save people from natural disasters and stuff. But still, it was kind of annoying that they'd just use a name and I'd scramble to remember who that was, what their power was, what they looked like, etc. It also might just be a bit of a pet peeve of mine by now. And they were gone anyways after the first third or so of the story so we could focus more on Piper and Conrad and Xanthia.

And then the last two points are just some nitpicks I wanted to mention. The first one kind of goes with my last point but I just thought that the beginning of this book was a little slow. It took about 150 pages before I started to get really into this story. So that turned me off from the book for a little bit. I'm definitely glad I stuck around, though! And then the other thing is also in the beginning and it just bothered me a lot personally. There's a scene where Conrad finds Piper's dad collapsing in one of the farm fields and discovers he's going into cardiac arrest. He calls for help and Piper and Piper's mother all stand by helplessly as Piper's dad dies right there, and the whole thing is pretty graphic and upsetting. This whole thing was pretty hard on me because my dad also died from heart problems (and coincidentally had the same name as Piper's dad), so hearing that without any warning really just. Wasn't fun. Anyways this event triggers something in Conrad (who was going through his depression) to sort of "snap out of it" and Conrad pretty much just invents time travel so that he can go back in time and save Piper's dad before it's too late, so really all of that traumatizing everyone was kind of for nothing? Like, I know it was supposed to have a major impact on Conrad since Joe McCloud is the only man who's served as a healthy father figure to him. But that was just too brutal for me. Is this a bad place to say I wish more books had trigger warnings?

Cover Art: I just wanted to put a little note here that for some reason, on the cover of the book I have, Conrad's hair looks brown, when it's repeatedly stated over and over again in the book that he's supposed to be blond. I know the lighting on the cover is a little funky because it's night time or something, but his hair looks like it's the same color as Piper's. Anyway, that was just kind of annoying for me because I keep having problems imagining Conrad as blond now since he's not on the literal cover of the book.

Final Notes

Favorite Parts/Quotes/Passages: I loved the part where Conrad and Piper go to the White House to find Conrad's missing little sister. It was so sweet! And then my other favorite part was when Conrad's grandmother, Starr, tells him and Piper the story of Max. Man, that was a great explanation to everything that had been teased and happening in the background. I know I've complained about exposition dumps before, but this one was earned, okay? This one was well written and well placed. We had proper build up to it and it happened at the end of the story, rather than it just being pasted in the first few chapters. Ugh, it was just so good!!

Enjoyability: 9/10

Would I Ever Reread This Book?: Hmm, maybe? I kept my copy of the first book in this series, and I thought this book was super good. But I've read the third book already as well and it's . . . not the best. I think I would consider rereading it if it was with my kid (future hypothetical kid that I haven't made yet), but I kind of doubt I'd really reread it on my own within the next decade or so. But it was still a great experience!

Do I Recommend This Book?: Yes, I think this is an excellent sequel to the first book. If you liked the first book, you might just like this book even more!

Who Would I Recommend This Book To? What Would I Like For Them To Take Away From It?: I'd say this book is another one for middle grade readers. It's not too intense (although there are some intense scenes), and I think it's just overall a great story. I think the take-aways would be a good time and just a great found-family story.

Overall Rating: 9/10

#five stars #piper mccloud #the boy who knew everything #for anyone curious the empty man was the only horror movie out of that list that i actually enjoyed #the other ones were okay but that one #ugh it was so good

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