CHERUB: People's Republic Review (4/5)

Despite having written nearly fifteen CHERUB novels before this one, author Robert Muchamore manages to keep things feeling surprisingly fresh in People's Republic, a bold new beginning for a new agent in the spy organisation. Ryan Adams takes centre stage this time around, although an unwilling foreign immigrant also shares a fair bit of the limelight, and this new approach really helps the novel to not seem like a rehash of past missions, which would have been easy as it shares a lot with the likes of The Recruit, Class A and even last year's Shadow Wave. Having said that, one caveat quickly arises that plagues so many teen fiction series today, and that's that if you didn't like CHERUB before now, you're unlikely to enjoy this one anymore. Muchamore does indeed spin a yarn that is wildly different in many respects to any stories he's told so far, but the way in which he tells it is certainly nothing new, a simplistic take on danger, action and romance that never dares to really surprise us or pull at the emotional strings. However, if you were a fan of the first series of novels, then cameos from past characters like Amy Collins and Lauren Adams should be more than enough to make this feel like a neat transition into a new arc rather than a disjointed attempt to sever all ties with what's come before. Though this certainly isn't the best place to start for newcomers, supposedly assuming that you know what the organisation is and will understand the cameos, there's a unique sense of originality and unpredictability that hasn't really been present in CHERUB since the days of The Recruit, and this new series is only intended to be a trilogy rather than a full-on series, that could amount to some great new twists along the way!