PERRY & GOBI

Perry Stormaire is a teenage student. Gobi Zaksauskas is an assassin.

In the data above, it lists them as students and that is kind of true and really off the mark at the same time.

In the first of the two adventures, Stormaire is definitely a high school student and Zaksauskas is a foreign exchange visitor staying with his family. That is the kind of true part. As time go by and the bullets do too, we learn that she is not really a student and not even a teenager anymore but actually a killer with a mission.

In the second adventure, Stormaire is between high school and college and Zaksauskas is ... well, I do not want to give too much away but suffice it to say she is not pretending to be a student any longer and people around her continue to get shot so her career is not exactly a conventional one.

Stormaire is about as normal a teenage man can be. He is fascinated by females but too shy and awkward to do anything about it. He is into video games and rock music and he plays a pretty good bass and helps his best friend write what sound like quite good songs. It is his hope to become a professional musician but his parents have other ideas (no shock there).

Zaksauskas is, when Stormaire meets her, about as dorky as a girl can get. She figuratively disappears into the background because of her clothes and her extremely shy demeanor. Of course, since we have already established that she is an assassin, that appearance is all a cover and when she does the big unveiling en route her killing assignments, she shows that she is a very attractive, very athletic young woman as adept with her hands and feet as she is with her handgun, and she is deadly with the latter.

Their's will be a very interesting relationship, shown from the beginning with the accurate exclamation by Stormaire to Zaksauskas, "You shot me".

This series is billed as being for young adults and I can see that. I can also see that they should probably be in the latter stage of teenager-ship because while there is nothing explicit in any of the sexual musings of some of the characters, they edge up to it.

Then again, the main character, and the person whose point of view details the adventures, is most definitely a healthy young man with a healthy young man's desire for healthy (okay, maybe settling for 'alive') young women. That and the considerably high number of bullets flying all over the place and quite a few landing inside people, make this almost an adult series and I would have so classified it if I had not seen a couple of references otherwise.

Whichever it truly is, it is such a delightful, easy and fast to read series that I do not care one way or the other. I was told about the series from a friend and checked it out, saw how fun the first book looked, bought it and started reading it. The next day I got and read the second. Boy, did I wish there had been a third, it was that much fun.

As you get into the adventures, you will see why this series belongs in a spy-fiction compendium like this. And you will, hopefully, see why I enjoyed it so much.