Sunday 22 June 2014

The Three - Slightly Ranty Book Review


The Three
by Sarah Lotz


What is it about:
The world is stunned when four commuter planes crash within hours of each other on different continents. Facing global panic, officials are under pressure to find the causes. With terrorist attacks and environmental factors ruled out, there doesn't appear to be a correlation between the crashes, except that in three of the four air disasters a child survivor is found in the wreckage.

Dubbed 'The Three' by the international press, the children all exhibit disturbing behavioural problems, presumably caused by the horror they lived through and the unrelenting press attention. This attention becomes more than just intrusive when a rapture cult led by a charismatic evangelical minister insists that the survivors are three of the four harbingers of the apocalypse. The Three are forced to go into hiding, but as the children's behaviour becomes increasingly disturbing, even their guardians begin to question their miraculous survival...


What did I think of it:
This is a nice read.

The story is set up as if it's a non-fiction book about the events around the surviving children of the plane crashes. It is told in a series of interviews and articles and such. This means it has many different narrators.

And there we have my first little grumble. As is often the case with multiple narrators, some of those narrators sound very alike. Especially the narrators that kept using the name of the person who talked with them sounded very much the same.

But other narrators luckily had more of a unique voice, so I didn't grumble too much about it.

And overall this is an intriguing story. I liked how it was kept vague if the things people thought had happened, really did happen or not. I liked how this story left it up to the reader to draw his/her own conclusion.

Until I reached the point I thought was a great ending, and there were some extra chapters still to come...

And in those last chapters I was force-fed told what conclusions I should draw from this story...

Yeah.

It ruined the story for me to be honest.

And I wonder why. Why tell a really good story that leaves it up to the reader to decide what to believe, only to slap on a couple of 'anniversary edition extra's' that take away all room for interpretation? Really?

So what could have been a good story with a strong ending, open to interpretation, this turned out to be a disappointment for me. I don't think I will try more books by this author.

Why should you read it:
It's mostly a really intriguing and suspenseful read.


buy the book from The Book Depository, free delivery

2 comments:

Blodeuedd said...

I...do not know. Eh

Aurian said...

I have to admit, I hate open endings and having to decide for myself what was real and what was not. So perhaps getting the real answer as an epilogue would work for me. But this is not a book I want to read.