By day, Aissa and Zandria are hardworking citizens of the Technocrat city of Palinor; by night, they are Magi spies and assassins-in-training.The twins scour the city for any remnants of their people's former power. Their mission: to find and kill the Technocrat heir, a hidden child who is one of the Heartless-people born without a heart. Aro, an attractive young Technocrat researcher, tasks Aissa with helping find a cure for the Heartless, but not everything is as it seems: Old friends cannot be trusted, new emotions cannot be ignored. When Zandria is captured by the Technocrats, Aissa must weigh loyalty to her mission against her sister's life and her own burgeoning love in the ultimate moral quandary. Each side views the other as unequivocally evil. Connolly, however, undermines these perceptions, depicting both underhanded Magi ploys and Technocrat compassion: a subtle take on the current expectation of moral ambiguity in fantasy. The book's strengths lie in its well-crafted prose, worldbuilding, and richly drawn supporting characters; the leads, however, feel a bit more inaccessible. Emotionally repressed Aissa's confidence in her intelligence and abilities approaches arrogance; the better-humored Zandria plays a much smaller role, and her absence in the latter half of the book goes almost unnoticed. The stakes, too, sometimes feel too low to drive the depth of the twins' hatred. Main characters default to White; there is some diversity of skin tone in secondary characters.A taut, emotionally arresting fantasy. (Fantasy. 13-18)

Gr 6-10 A hundred years after their people were supposedly destroyed by the Technocrats, 16-year-old Magi twin spies Aissa and Zandria are given the task of infiltrating Technocrat society to find the Heartless Technocrat heir. According to legend, a Magi curse caused some Techno children to be born without a heart, relying on machines to pump blood through their bodies. Upon entering the palace disguised as a mechanic, Aissa meets Aro, a Technocrat boy who wants her help in finding a cure for the Heartless. Although the twins are loyal Magi, they also have their own agenda: find the lost Magi library while hiding the true extent of their powers even from their own people. The plot of this book fails to create any tension or sense of urgency as it meanders through a continuously shifting set of objectives which all seem to be equally unimportant to narrator Aissa, whose main activity consists of going to work each day. The dialogue is stilted and repetitive, with characters frequently repeating actions and concepts readers have already seen. All the characters feel undeveloped; Aissa is meant to be 16 but possesses the hopeless naivety of someone much younger, and everyone, be they Magi or Technocrat, views the opposing side as completely evil, without any nuance or shades of gray. There is no mention of skin color in the book, though Aissa is described as having red hair, and Aro has pale hair and blue eyes. VERDICT Readers looking for spy thrillers with powerful heroines should instead try Tamora Pierce's Trickster's Choice or Justina Ireland's Dread Nation.Aaren Tucker, Univ. of Illinois