Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Living Hell (YA)


Living Hell. Catherine Jinks. 2010. April 2010. Harcourt. 256 pages.

You have to understand what it was like.
There were so many of us--hundreds and hundreds. In A Crew alone there were more than seven hundred people. And B Crew was almost as big. Not that we had anything to do with B Crew. But they were there, in the Stasis Banks. ready for their next shift.
The shift that never arrived.


Living Hell is narrated by Cheney, one of the would-be survivors of the starship Plexus. Life on ship was going well. And it was the only life Cheney had ever known. He was one of the children born on Plexus. He was thirty-three or seventeen--depending on your view of things. (If you counted real years or shift years.) Yet one day, one moment can change everything.

When the Plexus encounters a powerful radiation wave--everything changes...

I liked reading Cheney's account. I did. It felt good to be reading science fiction again. To be reading science fiction that wasn't dystopia. (Though I do love, love, love a good dystopia!) I would recommend it to science fiction fans.

© Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews

2 comments:

Shweta said...

Actually the cover put me off this book :) I know that's silly but I didn't request the galley because the cover wasn't that appealing .I guess I was wrong in that ! Hope to read this book soon.

Becky said...

Shweta, I know what you mean. I didn't like the cover at all. If I hadn't been familiar with the author's previous works, I would have skipped this one too.