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Book Review: Searching for Sky, by Jillian Cantor

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Island is the only home Sky has ever known. It’s the only place she has ever known. Surrounded by Ocean, Sky, her mother, River, and Helmut are isolated from the world, but they have everything they need. Then Sky’s mother and Helmut die, and she and River are left alone, rapidly running out of food. Sky is scared but hopeful, until one day River sees a boat out in Ocean, and their lives change forever.

I read most of Searching for Sky with my heart fluttering somewhere around my throat. I would never have thought that anyone could write so convincingly about a girl who’d grown up on a desert island. I really shouldn’t be surprised – I was also wrong about amnesia as a topic.

I don’t think I can really pull off usage of phrases like ‘all the feels’, but that is what I had for poor Sky. Taken away from everything she’s used to, separated from the one living person she  and put in a place that is confusing and utterly different in every way. I also felt really strongly for her grandmother, and River. The differences between the way Sky saw her previous life and the way the rest of society saw it were illustrated really well and I liked the way that we slowly found out the story behind Sky’s mother’s move to the island.

I did sometimes wonder if Sky shouldn’t be a little more curious about the world she had joined, but that didn’t stop me flicking through the book at high speed. I raced along until I got to the ending, which was…confusingly ambiguous. I’d love to talk about it, so send me an email if you’ve read Searching for Sky so we can discuss!

Many thanks to Bloomsbury for giving me the chance to read Searching for Sky via NetGalley.

Book Review: Adaptation, by Malinda Lo

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Reese remembers the birds. She remembers when they attacked. She remembers the plane crashes. She remembers right up until the accident, and then nothing after. A month has passed when she wakes up in a government facility. She knows that something has changed her. Something has changed the world. She has survived when she should have died, and so has her debate partner, David. And no-one has any answers to give her – or do they?

I enjoyed Adaptation a lot, possibly even more than Ash, despite my eternal love of fairy tales. They are very different books, but they both have a powerfully atmospheric quality to them. Adaptation is particularly interesting because it combines this atmosphere with a science-fiction story that has a massive mystery at its heart.

The world of Adaptation is verging on apocalyptic. After the birds, the public doesn’t know what is going on. They are scared. They make up strange theories. Some of them try to investigate. Others trust the authorities, desperately hoping for protection. Reese doesn’t know whether to cling to everything that she knows as normal, or to plunge headlong into this strange new chaos.

Of course, having read ‘The Birds’ by Daphne du Maurier, and watched Hitchcock’s The Birds, I could not help but be reminded of them when reading Adaptation, which made it even creepier for me.

I loved the love triangle in Adaptation, despite not usually being a fan of them. Typically, they persist because the main character is trying to decide which love interest s/he is more attracted to or which would be the better choice, but in Adaptation the romantic options represent something more. They indicate two different sides of Reese; two different paths she could take. But at the same time, they are not just symbols, they are interesting characters in their own right who are just as entangled in the plot and the mysteries of the story as she is. I thought I knew which of the two I preferred, part way through the book, but by the end I was fascinated by both of them and I am looking forward to learning more in the sequel, Inheritance.

I also liked all the other characters, from the mysterious figures at the government facility to Reese’s mother, who stands up for her daughter and Gets Things Done.

I think that this might be a bit of a Marmite book because of the pacing. From the synopsis you might expect a thriller, and this does have some exciting scenes where I was reading on the edge of my seat/bed, desperate to find out what was going to happen. However, it was also quite a slow burner. I liked this, because it built up the atmosphere and it kept me guessing, but other readers might not.

I am looking forward to reading the sequels – the novella, Natural Selection and the full-length novel, Inheritance. Many thanks to Hodder Children’s Books for allowing me to read the ebook of Adaptation via NetGalley.