[5th and final book read for the Cramathon, December 2014.]

This blew me away!

I won’t dwell on the violent and generally explicit aspects of the book, since I feel so much as already been said about this, but I will say that if you’re wary of this book because of it’s content, don’t let it put you off. (I am made squeamish by dystopians in general, but the last dystopian I read before this was Lauren Oliver’s Delirium, which reads like The Very Hungry Caterpillar compared to this, and yet I still managed to get through it.) Similarly, the ‘experimental’ language might put you off, and although it did slow down the reading pace for me, you get the hang of it after a few pages. Although it is very graphic, all of the content contributes to the book’s themes and messages (and although the descriptions are gratuitous at times, it plays an important part in the author’s vision) and the book has a lot to say about the fragility of the social order, the ethics of criminal justice, and free will crammed into its short length.

As well as all this, added in there towards the end there are messages about the untrustworthiness of people (which seems especially true of adults seen from a teenager’s perspective), exploitation, abandonment, and entering adulthood towards the end. I might even recommend it to fans of Young Adult dystopians on this basis, since they are so popular right now and this would be a good classic equivalent to get into if you’re already a fan.

I am so glad I finally read this – it is not something I usually would have expected to enjoy, but it really is like nothing else I’ve read, and I really surprised myself with how invested I was. As I said, I feel that a lot of people would be tentative to pick this up, but I would urge them to give it a chance.