Gone

First time reading her books

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I have downloaded the other two. I couldn't put it down. I read it in a day. I think everyone should give it a shot. I can't wait to see what's in store

Great plot. Well written. Everybody over the age of 15 disappears and from newborns to 14 have to mend for themselves. As usual there are bullies, wild animals and some supernatural power. At times, it was frustrating but you have to put your mind set that these are kids and they are trying to survive. I did enjoy reading this book.

Story got to be too much like Under the Dome, and not written nearly as well. Pass.

5 star rating remains after the second read through. This got dark really quickly, and my memories said it got darker later. I was wrong.

This is so hard to read, worse knowing what happens, but it is such a good series.

Pros: good pacing, lots of action and plot twists, interesting and realistic (if sometimes infuriating) characters

Cons: I wanted the kids to do the smart thing - rather than the right thing; because a lot of the actions taken are adult, I kept picturing the kids as being at least 16 when the protagonists were actually 14

For Parents: good for reluctant and/or weaker readers, no sexual content but a fair bit of violence and some racial slurs

It's school as usual for Sam until the teacher disappears. It doesn't take the kids long to discover that everyone in Perdido Beach over 15 is gone. There is now a barrier they can't cross enclosing a 20 mile radius and powerful bullies are setting themselves up in positions of power.

And some of the kids are acknowledging they have strange abilities.

Gone has an excellent mix of characters. There are bullies who manipulate with words and others who use violence. There are decent people who want someone in charge who will keep order, who don't want to be the one in charge. There are cowards and heroes, kids who are responsible, kids who are victims. I thoroughly hated a few of them, particularly Quinn and his use of racial slurs.

It was easy to forget that the protagonists were all 14 or under. While there was one real psychopath in the book, most of the kids were adverse to killing - even when it was in their best interest (I find it frustrating when characters in books don't get their comeuppance. In life I'd never urge a 14 year old to kill another kid, but in a book you want to good guys to win and the bad guys to die, not come back in the next book to make things hard for the good guys again. On the other hand, it's a better message for kids that they shouldn't kill, so the author did the right thing).

The pacing was great. For a 550 page book, it's a quick read. There are numerous plot twists and the cause of the disappearance is explained in a rational manner.

Great for adults who want a quick, entertaining read, or kids who want a good story. There is some violence but I don't remember any swearing and there's no sexual content.

Just found it kind of boring. The promise of more was there but it just wasn't it for me.

I read this book when I was a lot younger and I just remember how it really scared me as a kid. SPOILER - The girl getting hit with a bat being the most memorable part of the book for me. Now that I'm older I'm interested in finding books that are scary and when I started to read this and found that part to be less scary although as I continued to read a lot of the parts began to give me chills. SPOILER - for example the kids that slow-mowed the boy disappearing, and seeing that it was a monster terrifying looking thing yet he was greeting it with a warm hug. That definitely was like wow chills for me aha. I really enjoyed the book and I'm excited to read the next one.

This was definitely an interesting, but long read. World building is a funny thing because in establishing the plot its very easy to lose a reader in the details. That's what happened here, especially during the first 200 or so pages of the book. I wanted something to happen, but the author was busy world building or setting up characters to move the plot forward. Once the action happened, it was grotesque and nonsensical at times, but well worth the wait. Released around the same time as The Hunger Games, Gone went where The Hunger Games seemed scared to go. Mass death of children, truly sociopathic characters, egotism running rampant, and answering the question of what really happens when you leave a bunch of reckless kids in a society with no adults. Fans of I Am Number Four, The Hunger Games, dystopia, or fantasy novels will have their hands full with this one if they can manage to get past some of the dryer chapters.

I wish I had gone poof!

OK, maybe that was a bit dramatic. I don't REALLY wish I had gone poof like all of the adults in this town. However, the reality of it is that I didn't enjoy Gone as much as everyone else who has given this book awesome ratings and glowing reviews.



I finished Gone a long time ago and I wasn't sure if I wanted to review it or not. There are over 20,000 five star reviews on Goodreads alone and I didn't feel like my review would contribute to anything.



Yeah, but I cave and now I review.



One very normal day, everyone aged 15 and up disappear. They literally just blink out of existence, leaving everyone aged 14 and under to fend for themselves in this small town in California. This is where the book takes on a very Lord of the Flies on steroid approach seasoned with some Heroes (TV show) and garnished with some Stephen King.

To say this book had a lot going on is an understatement. I think perhaps it had too much going on but even then the theme wasn't that hard to follow. You did have to wait a long time for anything to happen because the pacing in this book was very slow. Because you are constantly being introduced to new characters you don't really get to know any of them, keep up with them or care about them too much. Sadly, I was OK with that. Yes, a world without adults could get very chaotic. It was scary to think there were that many kids who were power hungry and flat out psychotic. I wasn't totally immune to the horrible things that took place in Gone, it's just that I was intrigued by all the crazy sci-fi stuff being thrown in.

The two major issues I had with the book were:

1. Heavy, heavy, heavy Christianity.

2. The non stop derogatory terms being used by one character in regards to one of the major characters in the book.

Let me make something very clear. I'm not bashing religion. NOT AT ALL. I'm very spiritual and not very religious for very personal reasons. However, I find beauty in EVERY religion. I'm also not against religion being in fiction. In fact, one of my favorite books is By the River Piedra I Sat and Wept by Paulo Coelho and I plan to read all of his books. The religion in this book just felt out of place. I feel that I can't go into much detail without offending someone. Simply put I didn't think that teenagers and children like the kids in this book would speak about God in the way they did. The prayers and the talks about punishment by God included in the book felt more like the author's agenda than that of children who are supposed to represent the majority of children reading the book. The little bit of background given on the characters didn't allow me to even try to pretend that they spoke like this on a norm. Believe me, I went to Catholic grade school and high school. Kids don't talk like this.

With that said, it totally irritated me that there was one character that kept using derogatory terms when speaking to one of the other major characters. Clearly, a strong theme in the book was one of good vs evil. Yet the “good” guy kept using these words when speaking to his friend. I didn't understand why it was necessary to include this language. What purpose did it serve? If you've read the book and you know why, please enlighten me.


On a serious tip...These two points bothered me so much that I jumped online and searched reviews on Goodreads to see if anyone else had mentioned the things about this book that rubbed me the wrong way. Can you believe that not one person mentioned anything at all about these things? OK, I just found one that spoke on the derogatory comments.

I don't know. Maybe I'm too sensitive... Nope, I don't think that was it.

I am going to close by saying that there are some books you need to read yourself and I have found that there are others that I'm OK with someone just telling me about it. I'm good with being told about the rest of this series. I read this book with my son and although he felt the same way I did about pretty much everything I wrote in this review, he wants to continue reading the series to know how it all ends. He's on book 2. So far, he says that the book is pretty good.

On to the next...

Take Lord of the Flies and give it the YA twists, add a bit if Sci-Fi and we're set to go. Interesting novel, not afraid to get it's hands dirty. I'll definitely read a few more to see if it improves or fades away. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

DNF ~ 10%

I honestly don't remember any of this, only that I tried to read it in 2015 and I almost died of boredom.

Reading can often be a personal experience. Not only is it the act of reading itself an intimate episode filled with complex thoughts and emotions, but also seeing our reaction to books over time can be special for each of us. One can always find it exciting to understand something in a novel that evaded you as a kid. It can also be maddening to see a book you formerly loved change into one you find lacking. For me, a book that I read when I was a kid was the novel Gone by Michael Grant. I remember reading it and liking it, but I never continued with the series, and I could never explain my reasons. Now, years later, I can understand why I did not love this series, and also offer a solid explanation.

This novel begins with an exciting premise. In the blink of an eye, everyone over the age of fifteen disappears from the small town of Perdido Beach, California. Of course, the kids start going crazy with this new found freedom, eating everything unhealthy in sight. After they come to their senses, they soon realize that something even stranger is going on: there is a dome covering the town with no way to get through it to the outside. They also begin to develop strange superpowers. Some kids can rapidly heal extensive injuries, and others can shoot beams of light from their hands. Then, there are the kids themselves. Those kids that were school bullies are now those who cause terror through intimidation. Soon, however, the concerns over the local school yard bullies is superseded when the kids from Coats Academy arrive. The kids from Coats, on a good day, can be devilishly clever, deviantly troublesome, and, in some cases, dangerously demented. Add in superpowers into the mix, and their behavior can become alarming to the enth degree. As if mentally unstable bullies with super powers weren't enough, then there is the wildlife. Animals are slowly beginning to change and evolve in unsettling ways such as snakes developing wings, cats teleporting and the local coyotes talking.

This is a very interesting premise, that Grant manages to use all it is worth. To start with, there is the sense of anxiety over how to handle everyday things. As you may have thought once or twice at a young age, a world without adults can seem like fun. There are no rules. You can eat whatever you want, never have a bedtime, and you can even watch the movies your parents tell you you're too young to view. Grant takes this premise to its logical conclusion. Everyone 15 and younger stays within the dome, including babies and toddlers. Who is going to clean up the messes, and help the kids learn basic hygiene skills? Grant writes a scene showing just that with 50 babies and toddlers and two teens taking care of them that made me exhausted just reading it. Then there is the food problem. All throughout the events of the novel, there is the nagging dilemma of how to get food. The town was not made for sustainable living, or even basic farming, so the reader knows, and the characters soon realize, that there will be a food crisis, and people are going to starve to death, whether they like it or not. This makes for excellent reading just in terms of the basic premise alone.

Grant uses his considerable writing talent to show the super powers, different animals, and evil characters in a very creepy light. For example, in one scene, a kid takes a late night walk into the library to find out more information on the dome. He soon finds a cat that does not like him, as the cat constantly teleports onto him, scratching and biting to get him to leave. At one point, the character holds up a thick book to defend himself, and the cat literally fuses with the book, so that you can't turn the pages of the book because there is cat in the way, and the cat can't breathe because there are pages in the middle of it's lungs and intestines. This is a sufficiently unsettling scene any horror fan would love.

The villains are just as diabolically written as the creepy animals. The kids soon realize that the powers they have mostly seem to be activated through their hands (putting hands on a wound to magically heal it, for example). To control those kids with powers who don't fall in line, one of the villains decides to encase their hands together in solid concrete. This means the kids can't eat by themselves, change clothes by themselves, or even go to the bathroom by themselves. Couple this with the fact that most of the goons are neglectful of their duties to help their prisoners, and you soon have starving kids wallowing in their own filth. Grant writes it as sickening as one can make it, without going out of the YA territory.

On the note of the villains, let talk about the characters and how they are written. Grant does an excellent job writing action scenes and knowing how to write horror scenes, but tends to falter in terms of characterization. Almost all of the characters fall into basic archetypes, such as the insane main villain, the twisted bully given too much power, the smart girlfriend, and the noble main hero. While this does make for easy reading, it isn't something that lends to painting a picture or helps me attach to the characters. The character arcs are also fairly minimal, with characters changing very little by the time the story ends. This means that we are more witnessing the spectacle of the situation our characters are in, rather than the characters development over the course of the novel. This is something I want to see improved upon in the sequel.

And, yes, I am looking forward to the sequel. While this book may be lacking in description, I do think it has potential for a nine book series. There is also the idea that here is the first YA book I have seen in a long time that can be read by younger teens. So many books labeled YA are meant for more mature teens or even adults, and I struggle to find one for younger audiences. This series, so far, is perfect for that demographic. I give this book a three out of five.

Really enjoyed it. Already started on the next one!