The Library Suicides by Fflur Dafydd

 

Not my cup of tea at all. Firstly, there's no indication at all that this is fantasy/dystopian, and I'm not a fan of those genres. I spent the first few pages wondering why there were no temporal or geographical roots to the story. It just seemed in limbo. Could have been any country, any time.

Secondly, not one character is remotely likeable: not twins Ana and Nan, who are hell-bent on killing the novelist/critic, Eben, whom they believe sent their mother, Elena, to her suicide. Not Eben, not feminist Elena, not Dan, the ex-con porter working in the library where the whole plot plays out. 

There is no doubt that Dafydd is a skilled writer, but I found this to be laboured and over-intense and if I'm honest, rather tedious. I always finish a book but it was hard-going and not that enjoyable.

There's a long list of people to thank in the author's acknowledgements. Very nice. However, she seemed to have forgotten the most important people: her readers. I'm not impressed.

Life First by R. J. Crayton

Wow. 

This was my maiden voyage into the dystopian genre. I struggled with this book…I struggled to find the opportunity to lock myself away for half a day to read it in one sitting!

As a dystopian first-timer, I really wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was hooked from the first page. The story is set in post-pandemic America, a hundred years in the future, in which the twenty percent of survivors are obliged to donate organs when ordered to do so. Kelsey Reed does not want to donate her kidney: she must flee before she’s under the surgeon’s scalpel, but escape isn’t easy, when first, she has to extricate the tracking chip in her arm. She is helped by a doctor, who treated her mother just before she died and who feels obliged to look after Kelsey, and her boyfriend, Luke. Her escape has to be successful: to fail will result in heinous consequences.

I’ll admit to not being a great fan of present-tense novels, but this was so well written, the characters so well drawn, I barely noticed. It’s packed with tense moments, gripping moments, tender moments. The unexpected jumps out from behind a door, and there you are, unable to turn the pages fast enough.

Brilliant.