The Enemy


Title; The Enemy
Author; Charlie Higson
Page Count; 440
Why I read it; Liked the reviews I read about it on goodreads.com
Grade; A+

Synopsis;
They'll chase you. They'll rip you open. They'll feed on you...When the sickness came, every parent, policeman, politician - every adult - fell ill. The lucky ones died. The others are crazed, confused and hungry. Only children under fourteen remain, and they're fighting to survive. Now there are rumours of a safe place to hide. And so a gang of children begin their quest across London, where all through the city - down alleyways, in deserted houses, underground - the grown-ups lie in wait. But can they make it there - alive?  

My Review;
This book is insane! I was hooked the first page, I love when that happens and it doesn't take 50 pages to start understanding or enjoying the story. The Enemy was the most intense, scary original book I have read in a long time. I love the sense of reality in the book, the good guys don't always win or survive and sometimes bad things happen out of nowhere and everything changes. There are a lot of characters in this book but the author does a really good job making each character memorable, so for the most part it was really easy to remember who was who. For the most part the language wasn't too bad which is rare in zombie/horror books. I liked that the kids weren't either good or bad, most of them were a mixture of both just trying to survive in the new terrible world they live in full of flesh eating adults turned zombie due to some unknown illness.
One part of the story that bothered me though was the littlest kids in the story. Whenever they are attacked by the adults or any other threat they always scatter and run towards the threat. It didn't make sense to me, wouldn't the little kids freeze out of fear or else hide behind the bigger kids that had weapons, or at least stay together? They are warned over and over to stay together but they never do and a good portion of the time the bigger kids chasing after the little kids and not staying together is what gets people killed. Otherwise all of the kids in the story act as I would imagine kids acting if in the same situation.
This book could really use a sequel, it's not really a story line that can ever come to a conclusion but there are a lot of loose ends at the end of the book. I can't really mention any without giving away who lives and who dies and other fun crazy twists to the story.
Read this book if you are in the mood for an intense, scary, sad, fun story. Don't read this book if you have to sleep alone though it really does get scary and intense quite often. Really there isn't much time in the book when something isn't happening which makes this a great book that is hard to put down. This probably isn't my favorite book of all time but it is my favorite right now, not one I will forget any time soon.
In the synopsis it says anyone over 14 is dead but there are quite a few kids who are 16 in the book so I'm not sure what the real ages are of people getting the illness.

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1 comment:

Brenda said...

Sounds interesting. You should try Gone by Michael Grant. It has some of the same elements.