Title: The Fury
Author: Alexander Gordon Smith
Series: The Fury #1
Published: April 5th 2012 by Faber
Length: 535 pages
Warnings: violence
and gore 13+
Source: Publisher
in exchange for review
Other info: Alexander
Gordon Smith has also written the Furnace series. Book 2, The Storm, will
conclude the story.
Summary : Cal, Brick and Daisy are three
ordinary teenagers whose lives suddenly take a terrifying turn for the worst.
They begin to trigger a reaction in everybody they meet, one that makes friends
and strangers alike turn rabid whenever they are close. One that makes people
want to tear them to pieces. Cal and the other victims of the Fury – the
ones that survive – manage to locate each other. But just when they think they
have found a safe place to hide from the world, some of them begin to change... They
must fight to uncover the truth about the Fury before it's too late. But it is
a truth that will destroy everything they know about life and death.
Review: I enjoyed
the first book in the Furnace series and for some reason never carried on. I
thought it would be interesting to see what else Alexander would come up with.
It’s different in some ways (for example, no prisons, a little supernatural
twist), but it’s similar that it’s what you’d definitely call “a boy’s book”.
So, one day, all Cal’s friends try to kill him.Daisy’s
friends try to kill her. Brick’s girlfriend violently attacks him. For some
reason, everyone wants to kill these and some other teenagers, and there’s not
really much they can do to stop it.
Somehow, they band together with other people in similar circumstances, and
must find out what’s happening and what they can do to stop it. But what they
do find will change their perspectives on everything. This isn’t the clearest
of summaries. It could be anything. But I was hoping for a lot of action, which
I definitely got.
The plot is set up very quickly. There’s purpose to
everything that happens, and being a 500 page book, that’s a lot. There are
some things I’m not entirely sure about. There seems to be teenagers from all
over the country who manage to get to Furyville on their own, which I’m not
sure if that would be possible and there’s not much explaining it, and there
were a few other things that were a bit “wait, what?” and not really connected
to the main reveal at the end.
The three main characters were well developed at the start,
but I think some of the characters that were introduced later like Adam and Rilke could have had a little bit more
work on them. They did get backstories, but I just didn’t really care for some
of them.
I like the way that each chapter 1)focused on a character
and 2)had day, place and time clearly defined. It made it a lot easier to keep
track of everything. The action scenes were really well written-fast, and kept
you reading on. I read this in an entire sitting (mainly because there was nothing else to do
on a six hour ferry ride from France
where all your friends are asleep or watching The Muppets) and just
couldn’t put it down. Everything was really well described, you may have well
have been there, and there was some kind of action happening every few pages.
The big thing at the end was a little anti-climatic, but
once you’d got used to it, you liked it. It left me with questions that I’m
hoping will be answered in book 2, because the general concept is very
different to what you’d expect from this kind of book and the way the rest of
the book had been playing out.
Overall: Strength 4 tea to a book that is action action
action throughout that kept me gripped from the start.
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