Imagine how excited I was, therefore, when I found out she’d written a sequel!
Think Twice picks up a couple of years after Don’t Even Think About It leaves off. The Espies are now seniors and still in possession of their superpowers. They’ve got used to constantly hearing each others’ thoughts as well as having their own thoughts heard and have even come to enjoy it. Their post-high school plans all involve the use of their powers, so when one by one they start losing their powers, they panic and try to save their telepathy before it’s too late.
I thought this was a great sequel and turned the original story around nicely. In the first book, the Espies don’t want the powers they’ve acquired, and now they don’t want to give them back. It was character-driven rather than plot-driven and although I generally prefer plotty books, this was such fun that I actually didn’t mind at all. Plus, there are like twenty Espies, so there are a lot of characters and viewpoints to choose from. And jokes about everyone secretly thinking about sex every second of the day don’t get old. Made me feel like less of a pervert, anyway.
I don’t know that I particularly rooted for any one character. The narrative is told from a collective point of view (‘we did this’, ‘we thought that’) and although you see a kind of third person picture of what people are doing, you don’t end up connecting with any one character more than any other. And for a book with twenty protagonists, Mlynowski has done a good job of fleshing them all out equally and giving them their own balance of good and bad characteristics.
The plot focuses around the Espies losing their powers one by one and trying to halt or reverse the process, but like i said before, this book is more about the characters than the plot - what they think about losing their powers and the lengths they go to in order to preserve them and how it impacts their relationships with the other Espies and their non-Espie friends and family.
This was a really decent sequel and well worth a read if you’ve enjoyed any of Mlynowski’s other work.
I received a copy of Think Twice in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to Orchard Books, Sarah Mlynowski and Netgalley.