3 out of 4 stars
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“If you want to survive, you're going to have to learn to be ruthless.”
The tensions between Japan and North Korea escalated to boiling point once again when a small plane, carrying an illegal biological substance, piloted by North Korean citizens had crashed into Mt. Zao near the town of Yamagata in Japan. Three weeks before Christmas, the Karvovirus or KV17 had started killing all the adults in Western Australia, leaving only the sixteen-year-olds and below.
The shortage of food, the loss of electricity, the quest for safety and a fresh start, away from bad memories of their parents' death, made the sisters, Lexi and Hadley, and all the other children from Perth move to Jasper's Bay. Will their future be bright and peaceful with Broc and his gang pestering them like a possessed clown, and the mutation of the virus causing the infected 17-year-olds to get out of their own sanity and uncontrollably wild like an animal?
Seventeen by Suzanne Lowe was published by Creativia in 2016. The story is set in Western Australia. The Table of Contents includes a Prologue which is narrated in the first-person perspective of Lexi, the thirty-two chapters narrated in the author's omniscient point of view, the Aftermath combiningly narrated by both of them, and an information About the Author. The book is filed under the Young Adult genre with underlying themes of friendship, love, unity, brotherhood, sisterhood, dystopia, good versus evil, death, destruction, jealousy, and betrayal.
The worldbuilding of this fiction book depicts a dystopian world of the youth without older persons to discipline the crazy teen like Broc who gets everyone's attention through his evil ways and enjoys causing the other children's misery. I laud the author for her unpredictable storyline and the plot is a masterpiece that wakes all the emotions of the reader. The story is full of suspenseful twists and turns, and it grips me from the beginning until the end in a perfect pace. From a numb feeling to being in a rage, I laughed, cried, feared, empathised, hated, loved and felt every feeling that the characters felt. The characters are likable, relatable, and realistic. They are introduced in a manner that won't confuse the reader. I like all the protagonists and I despise all the antagonists. It's crazy, but there came a time that I wanted to burn Broc alive while reading the hateful things he did.
Reading the story reminded me of the combination of the movies "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" and "Dear Diary" in a sense that the story could've started with the children sitting around the bonfire to start the horror story with a dry log thrown in the fire, then ended by reading the ending of the story and closing a diary. The story started in what seems like a historical fiction of the origin of the air-borne virus. The ending is tied up properly giving glimpses of what happened to all the characters including Polo, the Robinson's pet dog.
The number of errors peppered in the contents can turn a reader off. They include wrong, missing, and misplaced punctuations, random capitalization, wrong words used, wrong spelling, clauses treated as sentences, weird sentences, and wrong grammar. I award Seventeen by Suzanne Lowe 3 out of 4 stars. This book could receive a perfect rating from me after a very thorough editing. I recommend this book to all readers who are 18 years old and above especially those who are into dystopian style scenario. There are some scenes and foul language not suitable for very young audiences. Fans of the movies "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" and "Dear Diary" will surely enjoy this book despite the errors. It should not take a worldwide epidemic for us to find out our strengths. The major lesson of the story is for us to be ready at all times.
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Seventeen
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