Living Hell (Catherine Jinks)



Catherine Jinks put together quite an enjoyable tale here.
Imagine that you are 17 years old on a pioneering space ship, traversing the stars in search of a new home world. Your ship is a living entity of delicately balanced alloys and bacteria, self cleaning and self repairing.
You are at the birthday bash of another crew member, when alarms are tripped. Within 24 hours, you have to watch as the people you love die. This is very much a coming of age story, but in fast forward. Moving quickly from a strategic and heavily monitored existence to self reliance in order to survive.
A couple plot holes found but nothing that can not be easily disregarded.
In the end, this was not a challenging read, taking me the equivalent of one and a half days transit to and from work to make it through (2-3 hours). The concepts were clear and concise. The conversational manner and tone of characters was believable. I did not feel as if Jinks was talking down to me as a reader, instead attempting to coax to the reading level she needed. Very smooth in that manner. nice work Jinks!
Living Hell has excellent flow and character development. This is so much the case that it was not until i had read about a third of the book in that I realized it was technically a young adult novel. It was fast, fun, and in the end, I did not find that I had the ending figured out in advance. This is a huge bonus when? it comes to YA fiction as much of it is fairly formulaic and predictable :)
Jinks originally published this in 2007, but the copy I read was published 4/12/2010, this is likely the difference between an Aussie release vs US edition. Thanks again to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for allowing me access to read this for free in exchange for my point of view.
Note to the cover illustrator, Cameron Davis: bad ass cover art! nice work there :)

This review is based on a book kindly provided for free by the publisher or author. Please check my FTC Douche-claimer for details regarding this disclaimer’s existence.

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