Thursday, December 13, 2012

Like the Hunger Games? Then you'll like this!

Whilst trying to decide whether I would be dedicated enough to the Kindle if I bought one, I recently downloaded the Kindle App on to our iPad. I then decided to have a peek for free Kindle books, and subsequently downloaded them.

Deadlocked was one of those books, and Pandora (part 1) was another. You've seen my review of Deadlocked, and here is what I think of Pandora.

Well, Waters certainly knows how to grab the attention of an audience, even skeptical ones like little old me. We're introduced, quite suddenly, to the fainted Hope as she comes around after one of her spells that she's suffered from for most of her life. 

We're quickly introduced to a type of Orwellian, Hunger Games-y type city that spends a few months of every year battling a new plague. The plagues all have obvious names such as 'The Strangling' (any guess what that does?) or 'The Paralysing' (you may find this one tough) or even 'The Bleeding'. 

Hope lost her father to 'The Paralysing' and now her and her best friend Jake are trying to discover the secret to the plagues and whether they are government made... trying to target the suburbs and kill off poor people. After given information through a type of flash-drive, a photograph of Hope as a sixteen year old flashes up, with the name Pandora written across her face... there is no more information, but Hope starts behaving like she knows something and well - she faints before Jake can get any details from her. We are left, puzzled, and curious with Hope waking up in hospital, and Flex fighting for his life after having been pushed down a flight of stairs.

So yes, it has most certainly made me very curious. It's an interesting start and a great and very short read. It kept me interested, and intrigued, although I feel that at times it tried too hard to be mysterious and cryptic, but other than that - it was pretty good.
Hope seems like an interesting individual, whilst Jake, rather than being this stereotypical strong-man type seems to be a weaker character than her. 

I'm a fan of the post-apoc genre, and whether this book is meaning to to, I don't know, but  post-apoc conventions seem to be running through it. Well if I'm honest, other than the lack of televised tournaments that involve teenagers killing each other, Pandora smells quite like The Hunger Games.

The interesting thing about Waters is that from what I've seen and from the research I've done, she's basically writing a TV series in book form. Small books that pick up and stop in dramatic places to keep audiences riveted. Not as heavy as intricate novels, but short clips - I honestly felt like I was watching the first episode of a TV show. The Pandora Chronicles is a forerunner in how books will probably be in near future... mini-digestible stories, published every few months, quite like they used to be back in the olden days (where authors would publish to a magazine or journal and then you put their short stories together and voila, you have a novel!) 

I'll most certainly be going back for the rest of the series methinks. I just have to know what Pandora and her box has to do with a white-haired girl named Hope living in the not-so-distant future (around 2037 I believe). 

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