Review: Gone

Gone by Michael Grant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is it: The Gone series by Michael Grant, my favourite book series. I first read this way back in grade seven and instantly fell in love with it. I then binged the rest of the books in the series and then the last book Light when that came out too. I’m re-reading this now in preparation for the spin-off series, Monster, the first book of which is coming out October 17, 2017!!

Gone In An Extremely Condensed Nutshell: One second everything is fine, and then the next second, poof, everyone 15 years and older is gone. This is the story of how the kids of Perdido Beach deal with this dilemma. In dealing with said dilemma things get really complicated and really ugly really soon.

If you’re someone who likes horror, sci-fi, action, all that good stuff, you should like this. I think Michael Grant is a talented author in that he really knows how to write compelling characters, action, and horrifyingly cringe inducing horror scenes. You know—the good kind. If you like or know of Stephen King's work, this series is very much in the realms of his books, and I consider Michael Grant the Stephen King of young adult literature. They're both a couple of sick, sick fucks. This is also just a super entertaining series in general. Michael Grant has this interesting sense of humour that you'll instantly be able to detect if you ever read any of his personal writing/blog posts, and he also subtly injects it into this series. (Also like Stephen King does, wow!) All this amazingness being said—

I know someone who got bored reading this. Back in grade seven, my best friend said she didn’t like the book because it was boring. I sincerely, with all my heart and brain, cannot comprehend this. This is a decently long book—every entry in the series is—but it’s chock full of shit going down. I really don’t know how it’s possible to get bored reading this book. But, I’m just putting it out there: It’s possible. That would be the only bad thing I’d have to say about this book, and it’s not really me saying it. What I’m really saying is that I think she must not have been in her right mind while reading this.

But also, if you don’t like horror I can completely see this series not gelling with you, so maybe that was her problem. Even then you wouldn’t not like it because you’d think it’s boring, you’d not like it because you don’t like reading about kids brutally torturing and killing each other. I am genuinely perplexed, to this day, years and years after the fact, about how in the world that child thought this book was boring. Anyway I’ve gone on too long about this.

Read this book, I think it’s pretty good. It even measured up during my re-read. All these years later and I still think it’s great. I was slightly worried that grade seven me might have shit taste, but I was happily proven wrong.

CLICK THIS SPOILER TAG WITHOUT CAUTION IF YOU’RE CONSIDERING LISTENING TO THE AUDIOBOOK: (view spoiler)[Don’t. Just please, don’t. Or at the very least, don’t listen to the one narrated by a woman. I tried to find her name but I couldn’t.

I was busy and wanted to multitask so I listened to the audiobook, and it was not great. She was terribly monotone and ruined the action scenes. When people were supposed to be screaming and yelling, instead of me being able to imagine the perfect blood-curdling screams for each character there was this woman just saying her lines with the smallest/least inflection possible, and none of the character’s personality. She literally ruined the action scenes.

I mean, I know that it probably wouldn’t be very good to have screaming while listening to an audiobook just because that’s not really… Audiobook-ish, I don’t know. But if that’s the case then what’s the point of making it an audiobook if the format is going to ruin the book no matter what? No point, that’s what. Just read the book in text format because you’ll be able to scream in your head better.

I can’t speak for the quality of the audiobook made by Tantor Media and narrated by Kyle McCarley, that one might be good, who knows. I listened to a five minute preview but that didn’t really reveal too much. (hide spoiler)] (Click the spoiler tag, there's no spoilers I just want to condense this section so the review doesn't get too long.)

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