"Powerful pre-apocalypse page-turner in which morality is tested to excruciating limits"
Opening with the arresting scene of a body being discovered, the third in a month, Chris Whitaker’s The Forevers is a thought-provoking page-turner founded on a killer concept - if you could get away with anything without consequence, if the world was about to end, what would you do?
“The dead girl lay face down, ashen hair fanned out like she’d been posed. Some kind of terrible masterpiece Mae knew she’d never forget”. This is the grim reality of Mae’s present. At seventeen, she thinks back to ten years earlier, when news of the asteroid first broke - a ticking timebomb that’s set to explode. There’s no avoiding the terrible truth - “She was seventeen years old. She would die in one month”, for the Earth was “so broken not a thing would survive.” Amidst increasing rumbles and tremors, amidst people’s preparations for death, the discovery of the body of Mae’s popular peer Abi provokes questions - Did she jump? Was she pushed?
The sense of time running out, and the brutal psychological impact of knowing that the end is nigh, is masterfully evoked in all its heart-stopping starkness, while the dynamics between the young adult characters are authentically realised. All in all, this near-dystopian thriller has thought-provoking bite.
The Forevers is the type of book you only really have to pick up once. The plot drives along each page, so there isn't enough time to get bored- it's amazing how many secrets can be uncovered within the span of the book, and how much can take place before the significant event of the world ending. It gets you to think, was it all even worth it if they're just going to get wiped away in the end?
The Forevers is the type of book you only really have to pick up once. The plot drives along each page, so there isn't enough time to get bored- it's amazing how many secrets can be uncovered within the span of the book, and how much can take place before the significant event of the world ending. It gets you to think, was it all even worth it if they're just going to get wiped away by Selena in the end?
The depth of each discovery is also quite astonishing: each character has been thoroughly thought out.... Read Full Review
