Plucky teen gives 007 a run for his money
Back in the dim and distant past, “every man wants to be a James Bond” was one of our high school speech topics. Even at the tender age of 14, I wondered why 007 was held up as some sort of role model when there was so much that seemed, to me, plain wrong about his behaviour and attitudes, especially toward women.
Where, I wondered, were the gutsy, determined and plucky women who were having adventures and saving the world? It’s a long time since I’ve been at high school, so I like to think the James Bond topic is long gone and 14-yearold students can find plenty of female spies to read about. Then again, the more things change and all that . . .
But thanks to New Zealand-born/Australianbased author Brian Falkner, a spirited young woman has now burst upon the scene in the form of Cassie Clark — and perhaps in the near future, someone might give a speech on why girls might want to be her.
Or sort of like her because in book one of what surely is the start of a series, Cassie isn’t having the best time. She’s survived a hit and run and is back at college when she learns her father, a senior congressman, speaker of the house and third in the line of succession to the US Presidency, is missing.
Headlines indicating he’s involved in a “love tryst” swirl; Cassie gets mad and decides she’ll uncover the truth. Only it’s a good deal murkier, more fantastical and, ultimately, deadly dangerous than she imagined. Before she knows it, she’s set up for crimes she most definitely did not commit and on the run from some seriously bad people.
At first, she’s helped by her secret service agent bodyguard Cameron Henderson. At 24, he’s just a handful of years older than Cassie who has an unrequited crush on him, which gives her an endearing vulnerability and, at times, muddies her judgments.
She makes mistakes and wrong calls, doesn’t know who to trust and puts the life of her computer geek best friend in harm’s way. In other words, Cassie is human, vulnerable and relatable but simultaneously determined, quickthinking and whip-smart. Falkner knows how to write pacey action scenes — his last books were the alternative history fantasies Battlesaurus where Napoleonic-era soldiers faced off against dinosaurs (trust me, they were good). The abundant action sequences in Cassie Clark Outlaw — terrorist attacks on dams, car chases in the dead of night in the desert and helicopter crashes — could be straight out of a movie and, of course, you’ll wonder at Cassie’s ability to deal with it but, hey, she’s “outside the law and I’m coming for you”.
It’s a gripping story that can be read simply as a YA thriller, but Falkner opens the book with a quote from John F. Kennedy: ‘The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings.” So for those who want or chose to see it, there’s an extra layer involving the fraught world of politics, media and freedom to muse on.