A 2014 Alex Award Winner
Emily Ruff is a teenage runaway, living on the streets and swindling people out of their money through a shell game when she's recruited by the organization. In their school, she's taught about language and its effects on the brain, and how asking a few simple questions can tell you what segment a person belongs to and what words, when heard, will let you control that person. She's a promising talent to the right people (namely, Eliot), but when she becomes romantically entangled with another student and inadvertently kills him, she's sent off to Broken Hill, Australia, to learn how to better control herself.
But all that happened in the past, and now Eliot is looking for Wil Parke, the only survivor of a catastrophic event that killed everyone in Broken Hill. The official story is that the populace of Broken Hill, a mining town, all died due to a fire that released toxic fumes. But the real story is that a bareword, or an ancient word with the power to control anyone and everyone was released in Broken Hill, causing everyone to go after each other until everyone was dead. Now what's left of the organization needs him to retrieve the bareword and to go up against Woolf, who released it in the first place and the person responsible for corrupting the organization.
Lexicon hit all the secret-organization-secretly-controlling-the-world sweet spots for me. There are a lot of layers to this story, some of which you might be able to figure out just from my summary, but there were plenty of times when I thought the story was going to go in one direction and then moved in the opposite way. And it moves fast, jumping between Emily's story in the past and Wil and Eliot's race to stay ahead of Woolf and the other compromised members of the organization en route to the bareword. Despite all the stuff that I loved about the story, sometimes it twists and turns a bit too much, which made it hard to keep track of what was going on and to really stay invested in the characters. But despite its flaws, I still really enjoyed this. If you read my review of Mind MGMT and were like, "that sounds good, but I'm not really into graphic novels," then this will definitely work for you.
(Read as part of YALSA's Hub Reading Challenge.)
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