I'm really excited to bring you this book review today as I gave this book 5/5 stars. Origin by Jessica Khoury is set in South America in the middle of the rain forest and follows Pia a 18 year old girl who has been bred for immortality and lives within a compound called "Little Cam" who's main aim is to breed an immortal race.
Pia lives day to day learning about her immortality and training to one day become a scientist herself at Little Cam. However curiosity becomes the better of her when she finds a hole in the compounds fence and decides to venture out into the unknown jungle. Whilst looking around she meets a boy called Eio. Eio shows Pia what it's like to live so to speak in the "real world" and Pia starts to question her life in Little Cam.
I want instantly gripped by this book which is something that hasn't happened for a while. I was really intrigued by the setting and it makes you question wether places like this could possibly exist. I was really drawn to Pia as a character and how she had to grow up being the only child of her age and subsequently had to make friends with the animals to compensate for the lack of people.
Being in Little Cam Pia is very sheltered from the rest of the world and its vast amount of people, countries and technology. All the scientists have had to agree to not bring in or talk about anything to do with the outside world however when a new scientist called Harriet comes in she starts to bend the rules and expose Pia to life outside the compound.
This book really kept me engaged and I wanted to read on to find out more about the secrets that lied in the jungle and Little Cam. Overall I really enjoyed this book and seeing how Pia and Eio's relationship grew throughout the story. Looking on Goodreads this book does have many mixed reviews so it may not be for everyone however I certainly would recommend this book.
I've filmed a corresponding video over on my YouTube channel which you can see below.
So today is going to be a trilogy round up of Quarantine by Lex Thomas.
(Lex Thomas is the pen name that two authors write under).
Quarantine is a series about a high school on lockdown after a deadly virus is exposed to the teens and they are forced to live and be quarantined within the school. I will be reviewing each book and will notify when spoilers will be present.
Rating: 5/5Pages:
The first book is "The Loners" and starts of with there being "a drop" in the school playground that the kids are all anticipating. We don't know why or what has happened at this point. It then goes back in time to before this big event and we meet the two main protagonists. David and Will are brothers of which it is Will's first day at high school. They are walking the hallways when all of a sudden there is an explosion and the teachers start to throw up blood and instantly die ( If you think that's too gruesome this book probably isn't for you). The book then follows David and Will as they try to come to terms with the fact they are trapped within the school wondering how they will survive and get food especially since they aren't part of a group. The teens have taken it apon themselves to craft different groups such as "the pretty ones" or "the freaks". These are largely social status based but offer vital protection and food.
Let me start by saying the book is extremely violent and is probably not one for the younger readers(below 16?) There's scenes of swearing, sex, rape and acts of murder and it is just extremely brutal. Normally I would shy away from such violence however I really liked it in the book as it showed what lengths they went to to survive and how savage they had become. There was also a lot of thieving for food and people would trade whatever they owned just go get the basics.
We later find out that the virus only thrives in the bodies of teens and that it is deadly to anyone younger or older ( hence why the teachers died). We are also told that a teen who had the virus from an illegal experiment escaped and ran into the school in which the military then had to shoot at him and blew up part of the school.
In the foyer of the school is a scanner in which pupils go to on what is supposed to be their graduation day. Their grad day signifies the virus leaving their body and if the scanner recognises this then they are taking through a chamber and out of the school.
This book reminded me of The Hunger Games as it was very survival based and brutal but it also reminded me of The Maze Runner in which they had to learn to be self sufficient.
David ends up protecting a girl called Lucy and we find out that Will has had a huge crush on her however she likes David and we are faced with a love triangle storyline.
Overall this book really kept me gripped as it's very different from anything I've read before and again I actually really liked how gruesome and survival based it was.
The rest of the review contains events that happen late in the book and I suggest you don't read on unless you've read the first book. Below is a review I recoded over on my YouTube channel.
David is approached by some people called the scraps who do not belong to a group and ask him to be a leader for a group they want to be called " The Loners". David agrees and this is a natural progression for the book which I enjoyed reading about.
One day a student tries to escape during another students grad day and after that stint no more food is dropped into the quad. Things get really desperate for the teens especially for David as not only does he have a group to run but his graduation ay is approaching.
The day he's supposed to graduate the portal and scanner aren't working and David needs to find a way out to survive or risk death due to be surrounded by his friends.
Will, Lucy and the other Loners help David however we are left with a huge cliffhanger!
David find a tunnel to get out however the tunnel collapses on him and Lucy and we don't know if either of them have survived!
Finally a group of outsider teenagers manage to enter the school offering food and help. We are left not knowing who they are and if they are infected or not.
Needless to say I got straight to ordering the next two books and would highly recommend this trilogy!
Rating:5/5
Pages: 384
The second book starts off different from the first as we start to read from Will's and Lucy's perspective and are left to question what has happened to David. That being said it does pick up right where the first book left off with the group of kids called "The Saints" trying to free the quarantined students. Will and Lucy make a break for the exit and are so close to freedom when a school bus crashes into the side of the school and blocks their only way out. Faced with the reality that they are still trapped within the school the students turn to the Saints for answers about the outside world.
One of the ousiders tells them that other teens have been infected including the Saints and that family's were moving away from their children to protect themselves. The Army proceeded to shoot some of the infected teens and then put out a call for teens to hand themselves in however they didn't know that their fate would be a gas chamber. ( To me it sounded like a lot of what happened during the Holocaust and people handing themselves in not knowing what their future held for them.
Will and Lucy spot a outsider teen wearing an eyepatch that they instantly recognised as David's. When they approach the teen he tells them that he got it off a dead kid and this further backs up our thoughts that David is dead. For me I felt that his death was rather overlooked and didn't focus on it much however this did become apparent why at the end of the book.
Without David the group of Loners starts to disintegrate as they no longer have a leader to guide them. Members including Lucy reach out to new groups in hope of finding somewhere new to belong. Lucy decided to join the slut group and has to endure an initiation week... completely naked.
This leaves Will essentially on his own until Gates a member of the Saints asks him to become their leader. Will suddenly has to deal with this huge amount of power and pressure which I feel goes to his head a little.
It was really interesting to see the tables turn on Sam and to see him go from being the leader of the Varsity guys to being held hostage by the Saints and crumbling to nothing.
There became a point in the middle of the book where everyone seemed at peace with one another and their situation. They had all the supplies they wanted ( thanks to the help from the parents who visited them on the wall) and there seemed to be no major arguments between the groups.
I really liked that in this book you could read from Lucy's and Will's thoughts, experiences and perspectives. I especially liked getting to know Lucy more in the second book.
One overall point I want to make about this book is that it is just as brutal and violent as the first book which I actually really liked.
I'll stop there if you havn't read "The Saints" but if you have or want to see more of my thoughts on the end of the book then keep reading.
During Lucy and Will's time apart in separate groups they have an argument and from a reader's perspective you really want them to makeup and get together now that David's out of the picture and not complicating things. Surprise surprise not long after this point in the book they make up and even get down to... the deed... if you catch my drift.
One event that was quite unexpected and just reiterates how gruesome this book is was when Sam got killed by the pig that managed to get loose. It also showed once again how far Sam had fallen in such a short period of time. When I think of Sam being killed you would expect it to be in a fight probably shot or stabbed not mauled by a pig!
One character we start to get to know a lot in this book is Gates who is one of the Saints. Towards the start of the book we don't know that much about him but as the story progresses we not only find out about his past but I feel the school and the virus as made him go quite mad. Gates slowly starts to go crazy and hallucinate, he starts to believe that Will is his dead brother Colton ( who Gates actually killed).
The big twist at the end is when Will gets to graduate early, leaving Lucy truly on her own and we're left speculating what will happen to her and how will Will cope on the out side. When Will does get outside of the school who is he faced with but his brother! David's alive and thats where they leave it on a cliffhanger. Personally I really liked this ending as you are left with so many questions such as "How is David still alive?" " How's the rest of the state dealing with this virus?" and "How will the book end?". After reading this book I was really excited to see how the authors could possibly wrap up the trilogy and bring it all to a conclusion.
Don't read on if you havn't read the first two books.
Rating: 4/5
Pages: 272
The third book "The Burnouts" starts again exactly where book 2 left off which is a element I really like within this series. Book 3 is noticeably smaller than the first two books however I didn't feel as if there wasn't enough or too little content. After Lucy kills Gates in the first book she is kicked out of the sluts in the third book as their leader Violent also died in the same fight and the Sluts blame Lucy for her death.
One huge question left from the end of the second book is now that David's alive who is going to be in a relationship with Lucy?! We are back with the love triangle which is made even worse by the fact that Lucy is now pregnant with Will's baby! (This was a major unexpected twist).
One of the things David tells Will when he gets out is that there might be a cure for this virus and they begin to plan to find this cure. However when Will finds out Lucy is pregnant he is set on going back in to find her.
I'll stop there to save spoilers but if you want to find out more and get my review on the final book in the series then keep reading.
So Lucy is left pretty much on her own now that she is group less and stumbles across the "burnouts" who spend all their time making and taking any drug they can find in the school.(she also has a miscarriage, which we probably feel is for the best seeing what situation she is in). One twist to the story was how Hilary dies at the prom she puts on before her graduation. For me I felt like she had it coming to her and she finally got a taste of her own medicine.
David then helps the remaining kids escape the school and sees them reunited with their parents. Then the love triangle really comes to a head. Will gives Lucy an ultimatum to choose between him and David. When Lucy ultimately chooses David, Will flees town and is met by a group of people saying they have "the cure". Sadly this is not the case and the liquid they start to spray on the infected teen actually makes the start to throw up. When David,Will and Lucy start to see this they start to run but tragically Will gets shot in the head. As a reader we feel compassion for his loss but this seems not to be the case for David who essentially turns and leaves him showing very little affection. I also felt that Will's death was very abrupt in this book.
Now fast forward to the last chapter of the book. Lucy and David are reunited and the biggest plot twist of all is that Lucy is still pregnant! When she previously had her miscarriage she only lost of of 2 twins she was carrying! This was really unexpected and its sad that Will never got to know about this other child he had. This last chapter really left me hanging and I would of liked there to of been some kind of epilogue set in the future to see how they tried to get mack to normality.
Overall I really enjoyed reading this series as it really was a different read for me!
I would really recommend you start reading this series if it interest you and until next time,
So I've definitely neglected this blog for a while mainly due to finishing my course at college and then withdrawing from my course at uni ( I may go into this in more detail at a later date but for now its still a little raw). One thing I also regretfully have been putting on the back burner is reading, I did quite a bit at the end of August when I was on holiday but since being at uni I had no desire to read. However today I finally finished "Before I Fall" by Lauren Oliver.
When I first picked up this book back in early September I was excited to read something else by Oliver as I previously have read the "Delirium" Trilogy ( click here to read my review on the series). However I quickly realised that this book wasn't grabbing my attention and that I wasn't fully engaging with the characters.
The plot line follows a girl called named Samantha Kingston who is in the "popular" group at her school. Early into the book we learn that one Friday night she is in a drink driving accident which leads to what she thought was her death. However the next day she wakes up reliving that Friday morning and the same thing happens the day after that and the day after that.
At the start of the book I took a huge disliking to Sam and her 3 friends as they came across mean, overly cocky and that nothing or no one could touch them. However as the book progressed and Sam was made to relive more and more of the same day she started to change how the day panned out and started to realise why she is disliked so much. She tries to put right some of her past mistakes and becomes a better person and by the end of the book I appreciated her efforts however I still wasn't overly fond of her character.
As the story unfolds I feel that Sam starts to listen to her own mind rather than being brainwashed by what her other popular friends think. We also learn that each of Sam's friends no matter how popular they are still keep a dark secret or have an issue they'd rather not talk about.
The rest of this review contains spoilers to the plot line and ending therefore do not proceed unless you have read the book.
One aspect I did like in the book is the relationship development between Sam and Kent as Sam finally sees that he isn't as weird as the populars made him out to be and she remembers the bond they had when they were younger. This relationship is one of the reasons why I hated the ending! You get so wrapped up in the idea of them being together that I just couldn't imagine Kent having to live without Sam. I also feel that when Sam throws herself into the road to save Juliet its left a little misty as to what happens next and we're left to guess. Personally I wanted to know how Kent and Sam's friends were feeling after her death and why Sam was living in the state between life and death. Naturally I wanted there to be some kind of loop hole that meant Sam could carry on living her "new life" as if that Friday night accident was all a dream.
Overall I was a little underwhelmed and I am yet to be wowed by Lauren Oliver's work.
Finally! I have just finished the Delirium Trilogy by Lauren Oliver! It taken probably over 2 years from reading Delirium for the first time to reading the last page of Requiem. This is down to the fact that I wanted to read the series straight through and therefore waited till they were all published and I owned all 3 books.
In this post I will first be doing a non spoiler overall thoughts on Delirium and the whole Trilogy. Then I will be doing a semi- spoiler version of the other two books.
Pages: 441
Rating: 3/5
The series is a dystopian set of 3 (with a novella series that I am yet to read). Delirium takes us to a future USA that is trying to rid its people of Love and at the age of 18 gives them "the cure" to take the "disease" away. It follows a girl called Lena who is weeks away from getting the cure, but like all dystopian novels it's not that simple. Her and her friend Hana meet a boy who makes Lena question the cure and it's reason for it.
I did enjoy reading Delirium (for the 2nd time) but something about it, and I'm still not sure what, doesn't grab me like some other dystopian worlds. Maybe it was because it seemed a little predictable that the character Alex would come into Lena's life. Having said that though the ending was completely unexpected and actually left me a little angry that Oliver had written it that way! I was so wrapped up in the storyline that it was definitely a cliff hanger and a heart stopper!
If you like romance and dystopians then this would be a good book to invest your time in. Just make sure you know what your getting yourself into!
Read on only if you HAVE read Delirium, to write a review of Pandemonium I have to spoil the 1st book!
Pages: 375
Rating: 3.5/5
We finish Delirium with Lena in the wilds alone. Now Pandemonium is written slightly differently, it is written in two periods of time( and jumps between them throughout the book). "Then" which directly follows Lena after she jumps the fence and begins her journey into the wilds and "now" which is currently whats happening to Lena. We're not told how long ago "then" was but I assumed it was a couple months up to a year in the past. The "then" portion allows us to follow Lena as she becomes accustomed to the wild lifestyle and how she is taken in by a group of invalids. The "now"section starts with Lena in New York on some sort of mission to spy on the DFA (Deliria free America). However in doing this she is captured by a group of Invalids called the Scavengers along with Julian Fineman the youth leader of the DFA.
I found it interesting to see how Oliver went about carrying on this series and it definitely kept my attention despite such drastic location changes. Due to the more action based theme I think I liked this book a little more than Delirium and that is something you definitely have to keep in mind that this book will have a completely different setting and feel.
Read on only if you HAVE read Pandemonium, to write a review of Requiem I have to spoil the 2nd book!
Pages: 391
Rating: 3/5
Requiem is the final book in the Delirium Trilogy and I had really high hopes for this book that I'm afraid the ending didn't live up to (this is something i've heard quite a bit from other booktubers on youtube). Requiem is again written differently from the first two books; its told from not only Lena's POV but also from Hana who we only heard from in the 1st book.
Now hearing Hana's side was something I really liked reading about and was probably my favourite bit of the book. We follow Hana after she's had the cure and the events leading up to her marriage with the mayor's son. I felt it was nice to see how things were still getting on in Portland since Lena's exit and how the mayor and his son were dealing with the cure and invalids.
With Lena we see her and her camp move to a refugee sight where hundreds of invalids live and see them make plans to defy the cure and the government.
DON'T READ ON IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE WHOLE TRILOGY!
So here's where my problem lies... the ending. Oh my the ending was bad in my opinion! I felt like it really didn't bring the trilogy to some sort of resolution and it felt that Lauren Oliver just rushed to finish the book! I remember getting to about 20 pages left and thinking just how is she going to finish this? I think it needed at least another 50 pages or even another book to the series! The bit where Hana walked away from her husband and house I felt really needed concluding, did the house blow up? Did she meet up with Lena again?
And then the whole love triangle was sort of just left for us to assume Lena got back together with Alex, but what happened to Julian?
I just feel Oliver could really of put so much into the ending that just wasn't there! What happened after the wall went down, is this happening in other cities? What does the relationship become with Lena and her mother?
So as my final conclusion I am a little upset that I gave so much time into this trilogy only to be given a half hearted ending that leaves you with so many questions!
If you've read Requiem let me know what you though of the ending
