The Inner Movement Review

Title: The Inner Movement
Author: Brandt Legg
Date Purchased: 3/30/2014
Price Paid: $1.99
Date Finished: 1/20/2021
Rating: 3/5

I don’t remember reading a lot of young adult books when I was an actual young adult. A couple of minutes on Google revealed that while the genre is hundreds of years old, there wasn’t a massive explosion of titles until after Harry Potter popped onto the scene in 1997. I was well outside the target audience by then.

There are a few questions I will attempt to answer in this review, but to me the most important one is this: should a book written for young adults be judged by a different standard than a book written for adults?

The Inner Movement is a single volume collection of three books: Outview, Outin, and Outmove. (For those of you curious about how I’m tracking this…that’s three books for my yearly goal of 30, but only on title on this list.)

Nathan Ryder, a 16 year old from Oregon, is the protagonist of all three novels and the first book just hits the ground running. We quickly find out that Nate has been experiencing “dreams” in which he is in someone else’s body. They are very vivid, feel very real, and occur even if he isn’t asleep.

Oh. And at the end of each one he dies a horrible death.

So as each book progresses we find that Nate (and a few of his friends) develops powers which derive from his soul, he is part of a movement trying to awaken the world’s population to their soul powers, they are opposed by a secret organization that wants to stop them at any cost, they find alternate dimensions, they………

Sorry about that. Look, it’s three books in one. There’s a lot to unpack here and I’m…not going to do so. What I AM going to do is talk about the things that jumped out to me with these books.

My first observation was that the characters were pretty much one note:

• Nate was filled with more angst than any three people I’ve met, and vacillated back and forth between irrationality and extreme logic at the drop of a hat.
• We meet three female characters early on – one is the “pretty girl I see as a sister”, one was the “unattainable beauty that is somehow interested”, and the third kept saying “I’ll start my diet tomorrow”.
• The adults that pop up to help Nate along his journey all seem to be bound by one reason or another that they can’t share a thing with him in an effort to let him “find himself”.

Secondly, the action scenes (and each book contained more and more of them) were all pretty vague. It would be like watching an action movie where the camera was only focused on one person. You never clearly saw who was shooting at her, had no clue how many of them were there, and wouldn’t be able to pick them out of a lineup. Truly the stereotypical faceless henchmen.

Finally, there are some fascinating concepts in these books. The bulk of the concepts are based around past lives, being able to access those lives, and the thought that all time happens at once which makes past and future lives accessible to those that open their awareness.

Past those observations, let’s look at the questions I have. First up, I want to know the author chose the young adult genre. I’m not kidding with that last point above. Some of the themes just cried out for a deeper dive, but it never really materialized. It made me feel like there were missed opportunities.

The second question is a “me” thing. If I didn’t have all three books in one volume would I have finished the trilogy?

I’m…not sure I would have. Sure, the books were a quick read, and there were certainly parts of each book that were worth reading. But I don’t think I would have been captivated enough to pick up the other two books once finishing the first. In this case the single volume actually encouraged me to read books I wouldn’t have.

Fascinating.

And the final question: should a book written for young adults be judged by a different standard than a book written for adults?

This question first came up when I found myself judging the characters. Should I expect deep character development from a young adult book? And then the plot devices that served nothing more than to be an obstacle for the protagonist…are those more forgivable in this genre?

I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I think that you absolutely can hold the young adult genre up to the same standards as books written for adults. In fact, I would say that you SHOULD hold these books to the same standard.

Look, I can understand writing for a younger audience and not venturing into certain subject matter. Kids have enough exposure to some awful shit just by virtue of being kids in a digital age. No need to add to that. I would never bag on a young adult novel for skirting around certain themes.

But why would you want to skimp on character development? Or some more integrated plot development? If I was a young adult reader I would feel insulted that the author made the characters so paper thin. It’s been a long time since I was sixteen, but I knew no one that came close to acting like the kids in this book.

I’m glad I was able to finish these in a short time…I just wished the potential here had been realized.

Final Thoughts: Some potential here, but very clearly the author’s first book. If you can get all three for cheap? Sure.