Scan barcode
A review by ielerol
Annex by Rich Larson
4.0
It's been a long time since I was so eager to read a book as dark as this one. And it get real dark. Aliens have taken over the city where Bo and Violet live, implanting the children with parasites and hooking all the adults into a VR simulation of happy lives while they slowly starve to death. The aliens themselves are strange, scary, and also real gross. Just what I like in an alien. Bo and Violet are great protagonists too, flawed and immature in realistic ways, but also sympathetic and compelling.
The pace in the first part of the novel is relatively slow, introducing the band of children who have escaped alien control and the way their world has changed so drastically. The aliens themselves are not the only dark part of this story. Parts of the first half were difficult for me because I'm a lot more sensitive now to stories of children being bullied than I was as a child myself. The action picks up fast in the second part after a major plot development, and from there I pretty much couldn't put the book down. Hints were dropped about how the conflict might widen in future installments, and I'm eager to find out if I'm right about how it will go.
The mechanism allowing the happy reunion at the very end was not particularly convincing for me, but at the same time it was so emotionally satisfying, and I was so in need of some happy after the horrors earlier in the book, that I don't care.
The pace in the first part of the novel is relatively slow, introducing the band of children who have escaped alien control and the way their world has changed so drastically. The aliens themselves are not the only dark part of this story. Parts of the first half were difficult for me because I'm a lot more sensitive now to stories of children being bullied than I was as a child myself. The action picks up fast in the second part after a major plot development, and from there I pretty much couldn't put the book down. Hints were dropped about how the conflict might widen in future installments, and I'm eager to find out if I'm right about how it will go.
The mechanism allowing the happy reunion at the very end was not particularly convincing for me, but at the same time it was so emotionally satisfying, and I was so in need of some happy after the horrors earlier in the book, that I don't care.