Seems like ages since this popped through the door – think it was back in May. I didn’t get to read it straightaway as Big fell on it and carted it away – she loved it, and kept encouraging me to read it too.
This week it finally made it to the top of my TBR pile and I don’t know why I’d been waiting.
The plot is simple. Jarra lives on Earth. Most of the rest of humanity doesn’t – they live on other worlds that they reach via portals. But a small percentage of people can’t survive on any other planet than Earth, and at birth they react with anaphylactic shock and have to be portalled to Earth to save their lives. Jarra is one of these children, and she’s been brought up as a ward of hospital earth. But she’s about to become an adult and has to make choices on how she will live her life. With a massive chip on her shoulder against the universe in general, Jarra comes up with a plan to show the people from off earth that she’s just as good as they are…
Janet Edwards has put together a plausible society and structure for this book, her first. It rattles along very nicely, with a great lead character, the classic feisty heroine. The only part that grated for me is the futuristic slang – grazzed, zan are the two most used ones. I thought it was unnecessary, and instead of strengthening a future feeling, slightly weakened the dialogue. Apart from that I had no complaints to begin with and was quite enjoying myself.
Then there’s a fairly major plot twist. I don’t like to give spoilers in reviews, so I’ll do my best to avoid here. But at that point, I found the book suddenly got completely immersive – I was dragged in to the action and absolutely mesmerised by what was going on. What was just a good teen SF story becomes compelling reading as you really want to find out what’s going to happen – two people’s future happiness is on the line, with the possibility of a life in danger too. I won’t spoilt it, but the ending worked well for me, and Janet Edwards is definitely one to watch for the future.
Like I said, Big read this too, so when she gets around to writing up her review, I’ll link it here.
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