Thanks to its short, action-packed chapters and the delightfully dry narrative voice of 17-year Giselle “Zelly” Oliveira, Dennis Batchelder’s OVERSIGHT glides through its rather complicated science fiction plot in a breezy manner. Readers could try to figure out what quantum entanglement entails or dwell too long on the particulars of accessing the posterior cingulate cortex, but it’s not necessary. To appreciate Batchelder’s wickedly entertaining tale, the reader needs only to latch onto Zelly’s careening story and enjoy the ride. Zelly is a survivor, having lived through a kidnapping, the death of her entire family, and an entrée into a centuries-old secret organization that she’s expected to be able to run by the time she’s nineteen–if she lives that long. Certain that her fellow overseer-in-training Ying is trying to snuff her out before she comes of age, Zelly decides to strike first and her method is simultaneously horrifying and rather hilarious. Batchelder deftly pivots from a certain-death scenario and takes Zelly on a completely different journey, one that will help her to understand who she is and who she can really trust–all while spouting some saucy Brazilian curse words, only some of which are translated.

Her trips back into the life of her soul line ancestor are similarly entertaining and Batchelder employs a nifty perspective device to differentiate the voices, but these sections suffer a bit as they lack the strength and distinctiveness of Zelly’s character. The story could use a little more of the fascinating Ying, a worthy adversary and the perfect hard-edged foil to Zelly’s impulsiveness, and a road trip plot line drags on a bit long without much payoff, but these are minor issues overall; there is plenty of intrigue and enough genuinely surprising reversals to satisfy even the most sophisticated YA reader. Batchelder also touches briefly on issues of consent and personal autonomy in a way that feels authentic and necessary, even among all the mystery-solving and butt-kicking feminism of the protagonist. Ultimately, this story is about what it’s like to be a 17-year old girl trying to find her way in the world, even if that world involves assassins, time travel, and a society so secret and underground, the Illuminati and Freemasons don’t even fully understand it.

Dennis Batchelder’s young adult science fiction thriller OVERSIGHT pulls out all the stops–time travel, reincarnation, a secret society that controls all the banks on the planet, a friend that could be a villain, or vice versa–in a page-turner narrated by a wry and resilient 17-year old orphan from Brazil who may or may not be tasked with saving the world.

~Shari Simpson for IndieReader