A readable, short-ish YA thriller, this. The first third conjures a well-handled mood of dourness out of its future-set climate-changed future desolation. The opening chapter, in which young Devin struggles to bury his dead grandfather at the remote farmstead the two share, is particularly good. Thereafter, and since a kid can't run a whole farm on his own, Devlin makes his way to the city to start a new life as a street kid, an unforgiving environment of gangs, corrupt cops and the occasional averted face of disdainful rich people hurrying somewhere better. Good. Then the second third shifts mood to a tenser, more insidiously nightmarish set of thrills. Devlin accepts an invitation to a charitable home for orphans, where he is promised food and toys; but it turns out to be a prison in the countryside, where he and the other kids are watched in proper creepy fashion by a bunch of decrepit elderly millionaires. Escape is impossible; and although children are promised that eventually they will all be adopted by happy-ending rich families, we clock early on that this is a lie. Kids starts full of vigour, but after they have been called to the mysterious tower at the heart of the complex a number of times they go weird, or mad. Devlin's synaesthesia is revealed as having a telepathic component which is why the sinister Administrator wanted him in the first place ('I need you to be healthy Devlin,' she tells him. 'I'm saving you for something special.')
The final third loses much of this tension and creepiness, though. Once the true purpose of the place is revealed the novel settles into a more predictable kids-gang-up-against-oppressive-adults, Escape-from-Stalag-YA-Dystopia vibe. I finished the novel with a slightly anticlimactic sense of things, of a great set-up frittered, rather, away. This is a pity, since the first two thirds of this novel touch effectively on something genuinely unnerving. As the cover copy, up there, says: you think you can hide inside your head? Think again.
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