7/10 ( )

Extremely fast-paced, this book hits a bit of scifi, a little bit of romance and tons of action.

Tyler has moved from foster home to foster home all of his life. He doesn't have any friends, but much of this—unknown to him—is thanks to his 'side job' as an assassin. He's unaware of his activities himself until he starts hearing voice and soon learns that he's not the only one involved in this situation.

The book starts out with a bang—a tension packed assassination which sinks its hooks deep and grabs the reader's attention. While this is a great beginning in so many ways, unfortunately the story is too fast. There is so much going on that the action speeds along and leaves, at times, other factors behind such as character development. But action junkies will definitely get their fill.

The story is told from the main four character's points of view and switches between them, Tyler remaining the strongest character. While the change from points of view is well done, other factors make the characters confusing at first. The characters tend to have more than one name, which, being assassins in a secret program, isn't surprising. However, this flip-flop between identities takes a bit to shift into place mentally and left me a little confused during the first part of the book. Add the fact that even numbers are thrown in to identify the characters a time or two, and it took a bit to slip everyone into their correct file. But after this was sorted out, the story was very gripping and intriguing.

Not only is the idea of a secret organization with assassins, who don't even know what they are doing, extremely interesting, but there's a pinch of science fiction thrown in. Secret experiments and test tube babies add wonderful food for thought.

I can't wait to read book two since to promises to be an exciting read.

I received a complimentary copy and enjoyed it enough to leave my honest thoughts. ( )

PROJECT PANDORA by Aden Polydoros is a YA thriller about teens that are physically and mentally groomed to be assassins, leaders, and otherwise societal influencers to complete an unclear agenda from a shady governmental agency under the title Project Pandora.
Very quickly the book establishes that these four teens that are being followed have been programmed to carry out tasks for the agency and at the same time not remembering accomplishing those tasks when they become themselves again. It's as if the agency has created dual personalities for each of them. As their mental programming starts to backfire, they start to become more aware and question their entire lives. One of the four, Hades, is unique to the other three because he never properly took to the programming, so his dual personalities bled together, making him more aware, yet constantly teetering on insanity because of it. Some of the teenage interactions are a little sappy, to the point that I was consciously yearning to get back to the story and I would have really liked a little back story of the man that is their agency contact so that he was a little more that just a voice. That all being said, as the book moves along, I was rooting more and more for the good guys, the four teens, to rise up against their oppressors and break free from their mental shackles.
A fascinating construct for a book, with a potential for many more book in the series, PROJECT PANDORA is a fun adventure for the YA reader community that left me thinking about the story long after I finished reading it.
Thank you to Entangled Publishing, Aden Polydoros, and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for a n honest review! ( )

I liked this book. I decided to read this book because I really liked the premise of the story. While there were parts of the book that were really exciting, this was never a book that was hard for me to put down. I did want to see how everything would work out but I just didn't feel a rush to get there. In the end I thought that it was a pretty good story.

There were some things that I really liked about this book. I thought that the overall concept was very exciting. Teenage assassins? Yes, please! The backstory about how this organization started and how everything worked were some of my favorite parts of the book along with some of the sections of the book when the agents were on the job. I liked those parts of the book enough that I really wish that there had been more of them. I thought that the action scenes in the book were very exciting and really enjoyed all of them.

There were also some things about the book that I didn't like quite as much. I think that there were probably too many points of view in this book. Some of the points of view were really quite similar. I don't think that having four different points of view helped this book at all. I really preferred the parts of the story that gave us Hades point of view a lot more than any of the others. I think that it really slowed the book down to have so many different points of view. I had a few other issues with motivation and coincidences.

I would recommend this book to anyone who thinks the concept sounds interesting. This was an exciting story with quite a few interesting twists. I am a bit on the fence on whether I will continue this series or not at this point but I am definitely open to reading more of Aden Polydoros work in the future.

I received a review copy of this book from Entangled Teen. ( )