Rage

Author: Jackie Morse Kessler

Publishing Company: Graphia

Blurb:

She brought the razor to her inner thighs again and again and again, but with each sting came no release, no comforting numbness to dull the horror of her life. It wasn’t enough. So she cut again – swiftly, mercilessly.

Missy didn’t mean to cut so deep. But after the party where she was humiliated in front of practically everyone in school, who could blame her for wanting some comfort? Sure, most people don’t find comfort in the touch of a razorblade, but Missy was always…different.

That’s why she was chosen to become one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War. Now Missy wields a new kind of blade – a big, brutal sword that can cut down anyone and anything in her path. But it’s with this weapon in her hand that Missy learns something that could help her triumph over her own pain: control.

The review:

This is the sequel to Hunger, if you haven’t read it, don’t read the review, though the characters don’t actually interact with each other, it is easier to read Hunger first, if you check my April posts, I do have a review of that book there.

This book was amazing to read and get an inside into the characters that we don’t fully know from the first book. We see Melissa, or Missy, who is a really different character from Lisabeth. In the book, you don’t see a lot of other characters on her side, or you don’t know if the characters are on her side. We have utter humiliation that you feel awful for her, we have this habit that makes her different, and you can see the inner turmoil that you expect to see from a character.

What I love about these books is that Jackie Morse Kessler takes a really real and powerful subject, and throws the character with a problem into this supernatural world where her characters can deal with it in a way that we couldn’t imagine. Her characters are amazing, and we see the reality of school, that not everyone is liked, we see the bullying, she doesn’t hold back on any of it, we see the cruelty in the kids that are at the party, we see the pain that Missy is feeling, and you really do get the realness of that pain.

I said one of the things I loved about Hunger was the bluntness of it, the way that you could see the simple and brutal imagery that is the disorder the character had. This is different in Rage. Some of the lines in this book were some of the most brilliant lines I’ve heard from a book. At one point, instead of saying ‘he paused for a few seconds’ she wrote ‘a small slice of forever’ and it just blew me away at how beautiful and perfect that one line was to show us this ever waiting image of Death. And even when we were hearing about the brutal cutting that Missy was doing, we got a lot more colour imagery than anything else. And I think that it sets a different tone to the book. You still get the brutality of it all, but you get the pain she’s feeling in a different way.

Again, Death was just as amazing in this one as he was in the first, if not more because we get to see him more as a lover than just as someone handing out a job. The points where Missy was with him, you felt a lot more drawn to him than you did in the first one. And still he has all of this wisdom and this patience that I found fascinating to read. He knows what will probably happen, and yet, he won’t say anything about it. He understands the balance of everything and he seems a lot more cool and collected, which is hard because he was extremely cool and collected in the first one.

Missy was very dynamic in my opinion, she knew what she was doing was wrong, but couldn’t stop it, and you could see the inner turmoil she was dealing with whenever she tried to deal with what she knew she shouldn’t do. She definitely was a character with a lot more hidden depth than you expect, and it was nice to read. And we saw her opening up to people a bit more, not a lot, but we definitely saw it, which was a lovely thing to see.

The two other Horsemen, Famine and Pestilence aren’t hugely present in the book. We see them from two different angles, one who loves her job and finds it a great thing, and another who has done it for a long time and has seen so much that he maybe doesn’t want to see. The characters are interesting, but we haven’t seen too much of them so I can’t really say an in depth look into what I think of them.

The other characters are people I don’t want to really talk about, most of them are bullies, some of them are nice, but we don’t get much about them we see them as people you’d see but not know much about, which is fine, unfortunately I can’t really talk about them much because of it.

I think what made me enjoy this book the most was the fact that it was so different to what I’m used to. The blend of reality and supernatural is so well mixed that you get this wonderful idea about how close they are and how different things help different people.

My rating:

Setting: 3 out of 5

Characters: 4 out of 5

Plot: 3.5 out of 5

Writing: 4.5 out of 5

If you read the book, I hope you enjoy it, and I’ll talk to you guys later! Bye x