Dark Inside by Jeyn Roberts
My rating: 4/5 cats
yesterday i was in a discussion with some dude about teen fiction, and why it is so damn compelling and why we were lately reading it to the exclusion of all other literature, despite our grown status, and his reason was because of the instant gratification of it – that the pacing is such that it can generally be read in one sitting and you want to keep reading it. and it doesn’t mean that it is mindless, like a lot of adult page-turner fiction, but that it is frequently too exciting to stop reading. and i actually tend to be less indulgent with YA authors than adult authors, because if i feel they are trying to pull a fast one or get sloppy/lazy because of the age of their audience, i get pissed, so i am not just reading it without my critical faculties.
i like to think of myself as a discriminating YA reader with a narrow focus. take your love stories and shove ’em. i don’t care about your divorced parents or your worries over college or your love for some long-dead sparkle of a boy.
i wanna see you survive.
go on, survive for me.
i am so glad we are still in the end times/dystopian phase of YA lit. there is so much to read, i can barely keep up! and then tommy goes and gives me ARCs and i swoon with pleasure.
however. i will say that the pacing in this one really made me mad. i brought it to my jury duty, unread, thinking, i will probably be able to finish this before my servitude is over. and then i went and finished it with three hours left to go! fortunately, i brought a back-up book, but you try reading small-printed dense biography/history when the family feud is on in the background, a show which makes you stupider just by being in the same room as a television showing it. survey says: kill yourself.
i had not noticed the television at all when reading dark inside. i even read through that promotional video they make you watch about the role and responsibility of the jury.
bad juror.
this is like a YA version of david moody’s hater series. after a mighty earthquake, something is released that causes ordinary people to just start killin’. some people remain unaffected, and they are the hunted.
can you tell who is a killer and who is not??
um… sometimes.
best be careful.
there are so many great scenes in here, none of which i can talk about because they are better left to be discovered by a reader. there is one supremely ballsy scene in which a character does something selfish but understandable and many people suffer because of it that i hope does not get softened by anything in the sequel. if this were australian YA fiction, i would not even question it. american YA… it would be likely that somehow things would still turn out okay.
canadian YA?? well, let’s wait and see.
i feel like this should have been much much longer; there’s like a big game-changing situation that happens 3/4 of the way through, and this “turn” happened so late in the book that it seems cruel to make readers wait for another book right when things started changing!
come on!
i resent you, ARC, because first i have to wait for this book to come out for you regular folk (heh heh) and then i have to wait for a whole ‘nother book before i can be satisfied.
so for all my throes of excitement over the pacing of YA, it frequently just ruins my life. thankfully, there is a ton of the stuff out there. this one is just better than most.
