The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch
My rating: 2/5 cats
*EDIT shit – i forgot to say one little thing*
i initially gave this book three stars cats, but when i sat down to write my little book report, i found that i was so bored by the prospect, that it really should lose a star cat for leaving me so underwhelmed.
because writing book reports is fun!!!
you can put in pictures:
oooh, urban wasteland!
you can arbitrarily highlight your most emphatic words so people will notice you!
you can make links to things that have nothing whatsoever to do with your review (you should click that – halfway through, your heart is going to melt and it will not stop melting until the end)
but this book did not inspire any of that in me.
it is a pretty uninspired post-apoc. tale. or maybe i just have read too many of these things and they get same-y after a while. at any rate – the thing that was good and different in this one was mostly the character of the narrator. and by “character” i mean capital-c character. he is a salvager, roaming the bleak landscape with his overbearing military grandfather and his milquetoast dad. the grandfather is being buried on page one, but his spirit lives on in both of them – the father seems cowed and weak-willed, presumably as a result of being bullied by grandpa, until he does One Big Thing with disastrous results, while the son seems to have inherited a streak of badassery from his grandfather, but it never goes far enough, in my opinion. it seems to lost steam halfway through, when, surrounded by a real community, he starts to get all soft and runny. it would have been better to see him retain his flint and his mistrust because these are the qualities of a true survivor, but alas, it was not to be.
enter girl, after all.
she is a pretty good character. but this book feels wasted to me. i would have like to read a book that takes place before this one, when the three menfolk were plodding along, trying to stay alive. i would like to read the book that takes place after this one View Spoiler »
and i am all for instilling a sense of independence in the teen audience and i understand that it is very important to make decisions that are right for every individual, but seriously? View Spoiler » dude, not cool.
i guess it is good that i don’t feel excited to write this review, so i can save all that excitement for writing the paper i am taking a break from to write this, but still – i would rather have loved this.
** right – i forgot – WORST FINAL SENTENCE EVER. seriously – it takes the feeling i had when reading that part of Underworld that gave me soul-scabies and somehow made it worse. YES, I UNDERSTAND THAT WORDS CAN HAVE TWO MEANINGS – I SEE WHAT YOU ARE DOING. your cleverness is not going unnoticed. or un-shuddered at.
