REVIEW: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

[feather_ghyll]

Out of Sight, Out of Time: Ally Carter. The Gallagher Girls, Book Five Orchard House 2011 – it looks as if this was published in the UK before the US.

'Everyone was watching, staring, waiting for...something. I wasn't sure what.' (p.24)

Not that I mentioned it in my review of Book Four of this series, but at its end Cammie decides to run away for the summer on her own both to protect her family and friends and to find out the truth about the nefarious ‘Circle of Cavan’ – bad spies who have been operating for as long as the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women has been turning out (good) spies. At the start of this book, she wakes up in a convent on the Alps, where her caretakers are addressing her as ‘Gillian’. It’s the end of September, but she doesn’t remember what happened since she left her school at the end of the summer term.

Amnesiac spies are hardly a new trope, but I thought it might be interesting for us to find out what had happened along with Cammie, as she ignored her mother’s advice, started to remember fragments and picked up the trail of clues she’d left because she was determined to find out what she or ‘Summer Me’ as she comes to calling herself did. However, it’s pretty quickly clear that Cammie is an unreliable narrator, because she was tortured (glossed over) and programmed for the as yet undetermined time she spent held by the Circle. She hears music no-one else can hear, she loss time, she sleep walks and acts ‘on instinct’ - a lot.

Cammie has allies, once they get past her decision to run away alone into such trouble that they thought her dead, in her dorm-mates – best friend Bex is furious with Cammie for returning alive or so it feels. Meanwhile, love interest Zach seems like a permanent fixture at the girls’ school, Mr Solomon is in a coma and Cammie’s Aunt Abby is the Covert Ops teacher. All these people and Cammie’s headteacher mother are insistent that Cammie should not investigate her past alone.

Cammie is expected to catch up the few weeks’ work she missed, due to being semi-conscious up a mountain in Europe, as a senior in the final year of her schooling.
I felt too out of sync with heroine Cammie. Yes, I could understand why she was driven, but she felt like the last person to realise what was going on at times, despite being trained to be an observant spy. The conspiracy of the Circle has become a little more credible, but the revelations about Cammie’s long-missing father didn’t have much of an impact on me.

It went on my nerves that these Americans called their mothers ‘mum’ – I don’t know if it was the editorial decision of the British publishers or what, but I thought it was a mistake.