First up on the 2012 review list is a book which I actually read in 2011, but didn’t get around to reviewing. I don’t know why, it’s not like I had anything else to do, but in any case…
ULTRAVIOLET by RJ Anderson
This is a book which Sinéad picked up because Easons were running a 3for2 offer and she was buying the second and third Hunger Games books and she liked the look of this one. SO! I picked it up, as she was happily reading Mockingjay, and got stuck into Ultraviolet. Now, for the nitty gritty.
The Good: The cover. You can see it above, but what you can’t see is that it’s metallic and shiny and eye-catching and quite appealing.
The blurb. In its entirety:
Once upon a time there was a girl who was special.
This is not her story.
Unless you count the part where I killed her.
It does draw you in, I’ll admit that. I liked it a lot, and it was pretty much the entire reason why Sinéad bought the book so kudos to the publishers on the combination of those two things.
Third good point is the synaesthesia of the protagonist. It’s unusual, and it adds a new dimension to the book which moves it beyond your general “supernatural teen fiction” (a genre with which I am all too enamoured) because it is an actual condition, and therefore this could totally happen in real life.
Well…
The Bad: The main character is, well… She’s sort of a Mary-Sue. Not only does she have synaesthesia which, to the best of my knowledge, generally presents in one condition (i.e. seeing numbers with colours, seeing sounds, tasting emotions), but she has ALL the synaesthesia. Seriously. Everything you could think of, she has. And then some.
Secondly, the blurb of the book made me think I was gonna get some sort of psychological thriller in which we get deep insight into the mind of a maniac, a remorseless killer who knows exactly what she did, and the book explores her motivations for such a heinous crime. But instead what we got was a sort of a wishy-washy main character who isn’t sure what happened, or why, and is definitely not the sort of homicidal maniac the blurb suggests.
My last point as to why I didn’t like the book is a masso spoiler, but part of why I didn’t like it was that it was, well, kind of obvious. I had it figured out as soon as the “mysterious” whatshisface appeared. Faraday.
That’s another point, actually. It really wasn’t captivating. I forgot the names of half the characters by the time I was finished it a day or two.
Overall opinion? It started out promisingly but deteriorated, sadly. It wasn’t what I thought it would be, and sadly didn’t live up to the excitement the blurb promised.
The Ugly: 3 Stars out of 5
