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Dark and entertaining
I read this book in one night! I was unable to put it down, and as soon as I did, my 12 year old daughter picked it up and read it. The story line, characters and imagination in the setting is all amazing. I can't wait for the next book to hit the shelf!
[Friday, November 21, 2008]
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Reminiscent of others but original none the less...
I definitely felt this was going to be an unoriginal idea... at first... but then I read on. The book is very well written and the characters are worthy of the time we invest in them as the reader. But I couldn't help but think that this book seemed to fall into an overly re-used idea... something fun like a game (of challenge / chance / etc) is misdirected to us as innocence lost. This idea of the Twilight Zone twist that people now come to over-expect was once a great treasure in Science Fiction - "The Future that Could Be" and these types are always distopian in nature. Similar to Stephen King's The Running Man or Takami's Battle Royale or even slightly toward Shirley Jackson's The Lottery - the author lets us feel comfortable in a subject we have been immersed in culturally for thousands of years and then twists into a horrible feeling of disgust. The capturing of the characters familiarity to this otherwise alien idea only fuels the readers fascination. If you read this and find the story intriguing, then other books of this genre should not be overlooked - especially books from first half of the 20th Century (which often come closer to predicting the future then we would've ever imagined).
[Thursday, November 20, 2008]
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There are only x themes for a book to be about
Well, all in all I really liked this book. It's a very familiar theme, post-apocalyptic, future world with some really old school notions about entertainment. So it takes place in the future and much like logans run or the running man, there are these events that rather brutal, to the point it's kind of uncomfortable to imagine. (The only rule of the game is you can't eat the other contestants ;-( )
Many such themed books involve people watching this brutality as spectators, like the Romans did with the gladiators. To be a little more timely, it's done as more of a reality show but the same principle holds. The heroine's little sister is chosen to participate and she nobly takes her place. That's how she gets involved in the whole thing. That's about the point the book stopped being really cool and just got cool. There's this love triangle thing that happens (I don't want to spoil it for anyone) that really made me feel like I was in a high school girl novel and not a brutal sci-fi novel.
The book is cool and I don't want to imply that I didn't like it. Like I said, it's very interesting, she does a great job creating a really creepy atmosphere that is very dark and miserable and some of the details are just plain awesome. I didn't like the love affair angle b/c just like Jar Jar Binks in star wars, it felt like it didn't naturally fit there and instead was shoved into fit.
All in all though, if you like sci-fi, like The Running Man, Logan's run etc, you'll like this.
[Thursday, November 20, 2008]
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