Book Review - Plague

Title: Plague

Author: Michael Grant

Series: Gone (Book 4)

Publisher: Egmont UK

Release Date: 5th April 2011

ISBN13: 9781405256582

Synopsis

72 Hours 7 Minutes
Suddenly it's a world without adults and normal has crashed and burned. When life as you know it ends at 15, everything changes.
Disease is spreading through the streets of Perdido Beach: a devastating, hacking cough that makes the sufferers choke thier guts up - literally.
Across town, Little Pete lies unconscious, struck down by the mysterious illness. With the most powerful mutant in the FAYZ out of action, the future of the world hangs in the balance...
Escapism just doesn't get better than this.  

My Review

I have been having doubts about these books and the way that they are progressing, but I still have hope that they will get somewhere. However, to me, these books are following a very similar pattern - you have the standard issues of lack of food and water and people getting on each others nerves and starting fights, and then there is always some sort of threat, whether from Caine, the Human Crew, or giant mutating bugs. Yes, in this one, not only are they struggling to survive, we now have massive bugs that will eat you alive. And on top of that there is an illness going around that causes the kids to develop a cough - but no ordinary cough, this one will cause you to literally lose your insides. With coughs so hard and terrible that they choke on their lungs. So gross. 

A couple of books back I said that Grant was being gory for no reason other than to create shock, well he's pushed it to the extreme in this one - the coughing disease is bad enough and made me squirm, but then he has insects that grow under your skin and slowly eat their way out of you. It was disgusting and not entirely necessary in my point of view.

Then we have the characters, Sam is becoming very self-obsessed and a bit of a whiner, I get the whole teen angst thing, but seriously get over yourself. Then we have Astrid who is just as self-absorbed but playing the righteous card but then resenting everyone around her. 

And don't get me started on Lana - she was probably the coolest character, but now she sits by herself, chain smoking and resenting everyone she has to heal. She no longer seems to care and quite frankly just needs a good slap. I know she's been through a lot but she needs to just snap out of it.

There were a few moments in the book that really progressed the storyline and there were just enough to keep me wanting to read. I like the addition of Toto and Sanjit, and the ending was actually quite intriguing. These books are very easy to read in that they follow a certain pattern and have enough in to keep you wanting to turn the pages, you can also skim read a fair bit of it because they are so samey. 

Overall, worth reading if you are invested in the series, I just hope the next book actually goes somewhere.

My Rating