I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore - Book Review

Well I just finished another fiction book yesterday. This one is titled “I Am Number Four” by Pittacus Lore. I didn’t know anything about it when I picked it up it was simply lying in the house and I grabbed it. One of the advantages of Priya working at Penguin Publishing is she gets access to a lot of books. Now most of my life has been spent reading non-fiction but this year I have only read two non-fiction books so far, one about Alexander the Great and one about the Crusades, whereas I have read four fiction books so far this year. I can see the allure of fiction books. They read much faster than non-fiction and allow one to kind of remove oneself from reality for a while. Also they are much easier to recount and review.  

Okay back to the book. The book is a science fiction story that is aimed at a young adult audience. I admit I didn’t know that when I started and there is something a little embarrassing about getting fifty pages into a story and realizing it was really meant for a person in high school. On the bright side it reads very quickly.  

The background of the story is that Earth is one of eighteen life-sustaining planets in the universe. Lorien and Mogadore are two of the other ones. Lorien is a planet that was invaded by the Mogadorians (from Mogadore) in order to steal it’s natural resources because the Mogadorians had depleted or destroyed most of their own planet’s resources.

Lorien society is made of two groups of people, the Garde and the Cepan. The Garde have special powers, called legacies, which they use in battle. These powers included things such as invisibility, telekinesis, controlling the weather, immunity to fire, great speed, super strength and so on. Each Garde only has some of these powers and they are different from one another. So basically they are super heroes. The other group, the Cepan, does not have these powers. They are responsible for running the government and training the Garde when they get their legacies.

During the invasion of Lorien a small group escapes, nine Garde children and nine Cepans who act as their guardians. They go to Earth because it is the closest life sustaining planet to Lorien. When they get to Earth they live in hiding as the Mogadorians seek to hunt them down. Each child is protected by a charmed amulet and as long as they all remain separated from one another they can only be killed in order, one through nine. When one of them dies all the others receive a scar allowing them to know how many of them are dead and how many remain.

When the story begins, the Garde children have lived on Earth for some years and are now teenagers. Numbers One, Two, and Three have been killed, and Number Four knows he is next. Most of the story is told in first person by Number Four and he goes by the name John Smith. His guardian is named Henri and he is in charge of keeping John safe and has been moving around the US for years never living in the same place more than 7 months. The story starts with the death of Number Three. John knows he is next so Henri once again moves this time to a small town called Paradise, Ohio.

John is fifteen so he is in high school. During the story John becomes friends with Sam Goode who is a space geek who loves talking about aliens and conspiracy theories. He meets and falls for another student named Sarah Hart. Sarah’s ex-boyfriend, Mark James, is the captain of the football team and is the school bully. It was once I got to John’s first day at his new school that it became painfully obvious that this book was aimed at a younger audience. The book is filled with issues surrounding school bullies and young love. It makes them out to be issues of such great importance that it’s hard not to laugh a little.

While John is in school his legacies begin to develop. He is able produce light from his hands, he is invulnerable to fire and he has telekinesis. Also, like all the Garde, he is much faster and stronger than any human. John is constantly trying to hide his powers from the kids around him through as he gets closer to Sam and Sarah it becomes harder and harder to do that.

After numerous twists and turns John’s powers are exposed and the Mogadorians discover where he is. Henri wants to run but John refuses to leave Paradise because he loves Sarah and believes she is in trouble so he must save and protect her. There is a huge battle towards the end of the book filled with Mogadorians and various beasts from their home planet. It is a pretty entertaining. To see what happens go ahead and read the book for yourself. If you’re over sixteen it really won’t take that long. It took me about seven hours, which I spread over three days.

I would give the book three out of five stars. It certainly isn’t the best science fiction story in the world but it’s entertaining. One downside is that the end of the book leaves you hanging and there are two more books in this series. This book is not a self-contained story as much as it is part one of three. I will probably end up reading the other two books but not right away. It didn’t draw me in quite enough for that.

Side note: Pittacus Lore, the author, is a pseudonym for the books two authors James Frey and Jobie Hughes.