Synopsis: Sixteen-year-old Maddie Dunn is special, but she needs to figure out how to use her new abilities before somebody else gets hurt. Ganzfield is a secret training facility full of people like her, but it’s not exactly a nurturing place. Every social interaction carries the threat of mind-control. A stray thought can burn a building to the ground. And people’s nightmares don’t always stay in their own heads. But it’s still better than New Jersey–especially once she meets the man of her dreams… -Goodreads

Review: Minder is the first book in the already large Ganzfiend series, and I feel like I’m going to have a lot of catching up to do. I am a sucker for the ‘school for the not quite human’ storyline so it was a pretty safe bet I would like Minder, and I absolutely did. The main character, Maddie is put into a really tough situation right away that forces her to use abilities she did ‘t even know she had. This brings her to the attention of Ganzfield, a school for an interesting collection of kids with the potential for amazing abilities, from fire control to mind control.

Minder very much felt like it was setting up the building blocks for the rest of the series. Most of the book was focused on learning about Ganzfield and the types of people it holds. There was a great ending, but that came on fairly suddenly  and wasn’t what I had been expecting based on the rest of the book.

One thing I did notice was that in some cases things came a little too easily. I think this goes back into needing to get all of the pieces in place for the next books, but some of the story lines could have been explored a bit more before they reached their conclusion.

Ganzfield is a pretty harsh place and the social hierarchy is very much high school with a deadly twist of super powers. Maddie makes it her mission to shake things up a bit and try to make things better for everyone, which tells you a lot about her character. She’s one tough cookie and will probably never be content to just sit back and see what happens. She also comes off as very genuinely teen-aged, as all of her thoughts (especially boy related) are likely what many of us what have been thinking at her age.

It will be interesting to see how book one fits in to the overall series arc as the ending left open a lot of possibilities and it looks like there could be some tough times ahead for Maddie and company. I will be reading book two as soon as I can manage.

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Second Opinions:
@Obsession with Books 
@Cari’s Book Blog
@The YA Cafe