Review: How to Lead a Life of Crime

Author: Kirsten Miller
Release date: February 21st 2013
Publisher: Razorbill
Hardcover, 434 pages
Buy: The Book Depository

A meth dealer. A prostitute. A serial killer.
Anywhere else, they’d be vermin. At the Mandel Academy, they’re called prodigies. The most exclusive school in New York City has been training young criminals for over a century. Only the most ruthless students are allowed to graduate. The rest disappear.
Flick, a teenage pickpocket, has risen to the top of his class. But then Mandel recruits a fierce new competitor who also happens to be Flick’s old flame. They’ve been told only one of them will make it out of the Mandel Academy. Will they find a way to save each other—or will the school destroy them both?

First, a quick note: How to Lead a Life of Crime is among the most violent young adult novels I’ve ever read. If you enjoyed I Hunt Killers, for example, you’re likely to enjoy this too, but if the thought of YA books that contain murder, corporate crime, illegal drug trials, teenage prostitution, implied rape and even a severed head bothers you, then this is not a book for you.

Flick’s is one of the clearest voices I’ve come across in YA. He grabs your attention right from the first page and he never lets go. He is instantly likeable, despite being a small-time thief. Flick cares about two things in life: avenging his younger brother (which entails destroying their father, the murderer) and Joi, a girl he met on the streets. Because he loves Joi, he considers her his great weakness and knows he’ll have to abandon her as soon as he’s strong enough to confront his father. Flick is not your typical street kid; his family is obscenely rich, but Flick sees surviving on the streets as a way to toughen up enough to face the man who abused him all his life.

I never set out to be a thief. I suppose I once had something grander in mind. But when you live on the streets, you find out that your career options are limited. You can be one of the kids who disappear with the strangers who cruise through every night. You can sell the stuff that helps those kids forget what they’ve seen. Or you can be a thief. If those choices don’t suit you, you can always be dead.

Once Flick agrees to go to Mandel Academy, hoping to find evidence against his father, it’s nothing at all like he expected. The school is full of kids with colorful pasts and nowhere else to go. Some of them are hackers, some skilled thieves, some are drug dealers and prostitutes and some are even serial killers. Most of them aren’t poor misunderstood individuals, no matter what we’d like to believe. They are cruel, they’re vicious and they’d do anything to survive. Mandel Academy breeds psychopaths and sociopaths and prepares them to be world leaders.

In the second part of How to Lead a Life of Crime, Miller strayed into more implausible territory, and the further she took things, the less enthusiastic I became. The plot suddenly became too big, far too over the top and while it was still bloody and wildly interesting, it paled in comparison to the realistic grittiness of the first half. Some of Flick’s outrageous confidence was also lost somewhere along the line, which meant that he wasn’t nearly as funny (or as endearing) as he was at the beginning.

If there’s one thing in this book I truly object to, it’s the censorship of swear words spoken by the characters, and somehow I don’t think it was the author’s choice. I am firmly against using asterisks or anything similar in their place. That’s not to say that I advocate excessive profanity in YA, but there are times when it’s expected. In this book, all the teens come straight from the streets. They are ex drug dealers, thieves and prostitutes. They will use swear words on occasion or they wouldn’t be very realistic, would they? What are we protecting our teens from, exactly? And can we really write something they haven’t already seen? If we replace every F-bomb with f---, what message are we sending, especially in this context? That severed heads are fine, but the word fuck isn’t?! I think that’s ridiculous and maybe a little bit sad.

I’d have preferred it if this book remained as realistic and unsettling as it was in those first two hundred pages, but even with the turn it took later, it was a read I won’t easily forget.