Product Description

H.I.V.E. (Higher Institute of Villainous Education) is a top secret school of applied villainy where children with a precocious gift for wrongdoing are sent to develop their talents into criminal mastermind. After all, 'villains have the best lines and wear the best costumes'. One small catch is that the children cannot leave until training is complete, six years later. With villainy comes a certain freedom of thought, and every year one student in particular will show exceptional talent - after all, it takes the best to produce the worst. This year there are two students: Otto Malpense and his new friend Wing Fanchu are both exceptionally bad, and they are definitely not keen on being held against their will for six long years ...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13875 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Synopsis
H.I.V.E. (Higher Institute of Villainous Education) is a top secret school of applied villainy where children with a precocious gift for wrongdoing are sent to develop their talents into criminal mastermind. After all, 'villains have the best lines and wear the best costumes'. One small catch is that the children cannot leave until training is complete, six years later. With villainy comes a certain freedom of thought, and every year one student in particular will show exceptional talent - after all, it takes the best to produce the worst. This year there are two students: Otto Malpense and his new friend Wing Fanchu are both exceptionally bad, and they are definitely not keen on being held against their will for six long years ...

About the Author
Mark Walden is a computer software designer - H.I.V.E. is his truly brilliant debut novel.

Customer Reviews

HIVE teen agents
A great new series and well needed addition to the book shops. This will be a good series.

Hive
This is the second book out this year about a darker version of Hogwarts, although, since the two schools are set in our magic-free world, I suppose they're more like the opposite of whatever school trained the Marvel superheroes. Kids at a school for supervillains is, of course, a really terrific premise, if a slightly ominous commentary on our times. The other book, which I read first, is Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks. Evil Genius disappointed me by bogging itself down considerably in YA angst and dull plot points. In contrast H.I.V.E., while it threw me off in the first chapter, ended up being an entertaining, well-put-together book with a likable hero, Otto Malpense (yeah: last name Bad Thought!). What put me off at first was that a young Asian martial-arts expert and future roommate to Otto, Wing Fanchu, was described at least half a dozen times in the first 15 pages or so as having an impassive face. And then there's the H.I.V.E. student who's a fat German boy, a veritable clone of Roald Dahl's Augustus Gloop. This struck me as stereotyping--not simply un-PC, but cliched. HOWEVER, the rest of the book went on to be so engaging that I've decided to forgive Walden for those few bits of junk. H.I.V.E. is fast-paced, which is a real relief after Evil Genius. The book is sprinkled with humor, plot twists, and creative touches, e.g., the school motto is simply "Do Unto Others." Otto soon finds a team of buddies (Ron, Hermione, Neville) with a variety of abilities. And the story manages to wrap up nicely even as it sets us up for the inevitable Book Two. Bottom line: your 9- to 13-year-old will get a kick out of Otto Malpense and his villainous school!
The HIVE series are good, They dont come close to Jason Steed or Alex Rider books by Anthony Horowitz. ( I think Horowitz wrote Fledgling Jason Steed under a pen name) but are comparable to Jimmy Coates, Cherub and Young James Bond books.

Cliched and lacking in spark
Harry Potter spawned a glut of children's and YA fiction set in schools. Walden wins points for setting his in a school for villains and his pastiche of Bond-style villains and henchmen will appeal to adult readers as will his surprisingly sly satire on politicians. Unfortunately, the rest of it is nothing new. Indeed, reading it you can easily see the Potter influence, particularly with Walden's Nigel, a shy bald boy forced to live with the reputation of his super-villain father and whose only skill is growing plants, all of which reminded me too much of Potter's Neville Longbottom. There are also two thuggish henchmen like Crabbe and Goyle and even a teacher who's been turned into a cat.

So far, so yawn.

The main problem though is the bland central characters of Otto and Wing. We're constantly told that Otto is a criminal mastermind in the making and Wing is mysterious and good at kung-fu. But there's no vital spark to either of them, making it difficult to sympathise with their attempts to escape the school. The token girl characters, Laura the computer expert and Shelby, a jewel thief are defined by their skills, with no attempt to bring them out further. As a result, they feel two-dimensional and it's difficult to care about them.

There are some funny lines and moments in the book but they aren't enough to make the book entertaining. I enjoyed Otto's revenge on the Prime Minister, even though the context doesn't actually make sense (it's the council closing his orphanage, not the government). There are also a couple of one-liners, such as the headmaster's lament that it's "always the bald ones" who cause the most trouble.

The school is sketched out in broad strokes. There are four streams (alpha, henchmen, technical and political/financial) and readers are told what some of the classes are, but it all feels like a checklist, which robs the credibility from the world building.

The series mystery is tied up in Number One, the uber-villain with plans for Otto. Doctor Nero (the headmaster) wants to discover why Otto is important and what Number One has planned. For me, this was just interesting enough to make me want to give the next book a try, but I would really need to see more fleshed out characters to want to continue beyond that.