Yzabel / July 21, 2013

Foreverland is Dead by Tony Bertauski

My rating: [rating=4]

Summary:

Six teenage girls wake with no memories. One of them is in a brick mansion, her blonde hair as shiny as her shoes. The others are in a cabin, their names tagged to the inside of their pants. Their heads, shaved. Slashes mark the cabin wall like someone has been counting.

Hundreds of them.

There’s wilderness all around and one dead adult. The girls discover her body rotting somewhere in the trees. As the weeks pass, they band together to survive the cold, wondering where they are and how they got there. And why.

When an old man arrives with a teenage boy, the girls learn of a faraway island called Foreverland where dreams come true and anything is possible. But Foreverland is dead. In order to escape the wilderness, they’ll have to understand where they are.

More importantly, who they are.

Review:

(I got this book from the author himself, in exchange for a honest review.)

I read The Annihilation of Foreverland about one year ago; as a result, I was easily interested in knowing what happened next, and getting another side of the story. One of the very good sides of this second book is that you don’t have to read the first to understand and be pulled into the plot: since the characters wake up with most of their memories missing, the reader gets to discover everything along with them. On the other hand, if you enjoyed the “first volume”, you may find yourself wanting to read it again. At least, I did.

A warning, though: pay attention to details. No, really. Including names, for starters. This book is packed with little things here and there that aren’t so noticeable at first, but completely make sense once you reach the end. It’s not the kind of story you can afford to keep one eye on while doing something else on the side, because if you do, you’ll miss on something important, sooner or later, and find the plot “confusing”.

“Foreverland Is Dead” was quite the page-turner for me. Even though I knew the basics from the first part, I still enjoyed re-discovering the setting from the girls’ point of view. The relationships between those characters were interesting in more than one way: while apparently simple (the bad girl, the tentative leader, the one who does the cooking…), they actually go deeper than that, and not everything is what it seems. We’re taken into the plot mostly through Cyn’s and Miranda’s eyes, and as secrets unfold, so does the ugliness of human souls, once confronted to a situation threatening to go on for much longer than expected. The girls know they have to stand united in order to survive, yet they’re truly, only human, make mistake, and sometimes their darker side gets the best of them… for some more than for others. However, those who manage to overcome said dark side and fac their fears appear the braver for it.

I give FiD 4 to 4.5 stars. The one thing I wasn’t too sure about was, in fact, the writing style itself, often consisting of short sentences, which in turn sometimes makes it look jambled in places. Overall, it works for such a story, mirroring the girls’ confusion and how the world around them doesn’t make much sense; yet it might have the potential to bother readers who favour a more flowery style.