'When five teenagers wake up one morning imbued with absolute knowledge, the news travels fast, and before long the young geniuses are taken into hiding by the FBI. What would you do if you were 15 and never had to set foot in school again? Our heroes won't have long to think about it, as a secret organization is hell-bent on capturing them. And they also have a puzzle to solve: where did this gift come from, and who are these mysterious beings seemingly playing with their destiny?'
The Omniscients begins with five teenagers suddenly waking up one morning with ringing in their ears. When this mysterious noise passes the five of them suddenly find themselves with access to all available public knowledge, making them close to omniscient. Four of these teens quickly come together, drawn to each other by a deep need to be together, but a fifth is fighting this urge, until she too has to give into this desire and sets out to join the others. However, the FBI are desperate to get their hands on one of these teens, and set their sights on stopping her reaching the others.
This book definitely feels like the first part in a bigger series, not just because there are so many mysteries left hanging come the end that things haven't even begun to feel explained, but because not much really happens here.
The story begins with our five teens, Albert, Diego, Amber, James, and Jessica, all waking up one morning and discovering that they have access to a huge swath of knowledge. This access seems to be like being able to see into the internet inside their heads, and at one point one of the teens even 'accesses' a person's Wikipedia page in order to read up on them. This is never really explained in this first volume, and it's simply implied that the teens are somehow able to read the internet. They say more than once that they don't have access to hidden knowledge, and that they can only see public information, but then they'll be able to see into people's hidden records, and gather information that wouldn't be publicly available.
This lack of clarification of the teens powers is possibly one of the mysteries of the book, as it seems like each teen is able to do slightly different things, however, it also leads to the main conflict in this book. The FBI are convinced that if they are able to get their hands on these teens they'll be able to use them to gather information on the 'bad guys' and use them as espionage tools. This doesn't seem too unreasonable, as they're led to believe that the kids know 'everything', yet these undefined rules on their powers are definitely a problem here. Can the kids access information on databases on foreign powers computers? Maybe? It's not clear. Can they know what terrorists are up to? Probably not, unless they're keeping a blog on the dark web, but who knows?
I can't help but feel that an earlier clear description of these powers would not only help the reader, but would have helped the characters too. It would mean that the FBI might not try hunting down one of their number just to try and get an advantage that they might not even get if they do manage to capture on of the teens.
This conflict also seems to lead to nothing really happening. Early on in the book four of the teens come together and are placed inside a house in New York, somewhere where the four of them can be protected and studied, allowing the Health Authority to try to figure out what caused them to gain these amazing abilities. However, Jessica chose not to join them straight away, and its when she does try to get to them that the conflict with the FBI happens.
By the end of the book, however, this has been resolved. Jessica is now with the rest of the group, and those members of the FBI who were hunting her down have been removed. The five of them are now living happily together in their new home in New York, and the Health Department are still supporting them and trying to figure out what happened. If you'd have had Jessica just join them when the others came together a whole huge chunk could have been removed from this book and you wouldn't feel like you'd really missed out on anything.
This lack of anything really happening is a big drag on the quality of what should have been an exciting first volume of a new teen adventure series. There are definitely elements of great things here in this first volume, and the small snippets we see of the person behind everything, who seems to be connected to their strange powers, is intriguing and raises a lot of interesting questions; but it gets lost in the masses of stuff that feels very throw away.
With this being the first, and so far only, volume with which to judge the series I feel like it's hard to know if the rest is going to be great or not. This one volume is okay, but that's about it. I want to read the second volume not because this one got me hooked, but to see if the series will actually be worth sticking with. I hope it is, as there was a lot of stuff here to like, but if the story doesn't pick up in the next book I'm not sure if this will be a series that I'll be wanting to stick with.
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