iBoy by Kevin Brooks

“we’re all … animals - none of us know any better”

iBoy by Kevin Brooks is the story of a teenage boy who acquires ‘superpowers’. When someone throws an iPhone from the top of a 30 story building, Harvey’s head is cracked and the iPhone pieces get stuck inside his brain. Harvey is able to everything that a phone can do and much more. He seeks revenge on the gang members who hurt his childhood friend, Lucy. He becomes known as iBoy, a superhero protecting the violent local area. But in all of that, Harvey loses himself to iBoy as the line between good and bad starts to blur.

After reading How to be Invisible, I simply assumed that this would be another book for pre-teens. However, this book contains some heavy themes and should be read by younger adolescents. (Maybe 15 and up? It really just depends on maturity…)

Sister by Rosamund Lupton

“Grief is love turned into an eternal missing”  - Lupton

Do I even know how to access my blog anymore…? It’s definitely been way to long since the last time I read a book. I think that life can be explained just by looking at this blog – as time passed the less book reviews, not because I’ve grown lazy, but because I feel like I’ve lost the time to read. But with some of my tests over, I gave myself a quick break before I have to get back to my studies. Needless to say, I devoured two books in two days and will hopefully read another one today. Enough about me.

Rosamund Lupton’s Sister, is a thriller (well at least for my standards, as I am not really used to scary things) and almost detective fiction. It follows Beatrice’s journey as she looks for her missing sister. When the police end the case, Beatrice is unsatisfied with the verdict. It becomes all up to Beatrice to uncover the truth. She doesn’t just uncover the mystery but also learns about herself and her relationships.

Maybe it’s the fact that I hadn’t read a book for a long time, or that someone left this book on their fence for someone to take it for free or just simply because I always get to attached to novels, but I absolutely loved it! The language was simple and it was quite easy to read. The only hard part was figuring out when the settings switched - when Beatrice was talking to the detective or talking to her sister through the letter. But this form is perfect for the novel when you get to the end and learn the truth about this ‘letter’. I didn’t start reading expecting much but by the end I was screaming out loud at the plot twists.

1984 by George Orwell

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.” 

1984 by George Orwell is a science fiction story that attacks totalitarianism. The book is set in the superstate of Oceania, in the province called Airstrip One. Everything and everyone from the party is monitored all the time by Big Brother, the supreme leader. Anyone who shows any sign of rebelling against IngSoc (the government) is punished, tortured until they confess to all sorts of crimes and then killed. Winston, the protagonist, works in the Ministry of Truth. His jobs are to falsify records. Smith inwardly rebels and finds that there are others like him. However, the Party can see everything and so Winston is not as successful as he thinks and is ultimately betrayed by his co-worker in the end.

Should you read this book? Definitely! Not only is this book a classic and references to it all the time in media, pop culture and everyday life but it is surprisingly entertaining and easy to read. From the beginning, I understood everything and I was actually invested in the story, I say ‘actually’ because the classic novels are not always so accessible to modern teen readers and this was an exception. Although, I have to warn any future readers, that the ending is not a happy one and while this was necessary to prove Orwell’s point, I am never one to be satisfied with a sad ending.

George Orwell uses the novel to warn the readers of that time about communism and totalitarianism in general. George Orwell sets the story in 1984 - only 35 years after the publication date – so to warn the English public that this could easily happen to them if they didn’t ward off totalitarianism. The Cold War at that time had not escalated yet and so there were still some academic supporters. As Orwell put it, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for Democratic Socialism as I understand it." Orwell was against the communist up rise in Russia and Spain and so sought to warn the British and Americans of this. Personally, I agree with Ben Pimlott’s introduction (Penguin publication) which stated that this book was also an attack on the direction of the British Labour government, at that time, into state socialism. Orwell may have been a democratic socialist but I don’t think he was pleased with the direction the Labour government was heading in. Mostly, because the name of the government in 1984 was IngSoc, meaning English Socialism in Newspeak. This meant that England/Britain was still the power house of Oceania; it wasn’t another country such as a Russia who had taken over England and turned it communist. [NOTE: Going back now, I really think George Orwell wrote about Totalitarian Russia. As I am studying Russia in Stalin's period, I see more and more similarities about the past Russia and 1984 - it is really shocking. Things like the no persons, trials for people who used to be part of the party and even thought crime occurred in Russia.]