Quicksilver | R.J. Anderson | Review
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Two weeks ago I posted about a book called Ultraviolet, by R.J. Anderson. I also mentioned how I had a Twitter conversation with the author, and ended up going to the book launch of the sequel, Quicksilver. So! With that in mind, today’s post is a review of Quicksilver, and then tomorrow I'll be letting you know how the book launch went. Sound okay?
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If you
remember back to when I wrote about Ultraviolet, I raved about how awesome it
was. It really was amazing. Quicksilver was just as good! I absolutely loved
them both. If you haven’t read the review I did of Ultraviolet, do go and have a read before you keep reading this. That will give you a little background
into this one.
In
Ultraviolet, the main character is Alison, a girl with synaesthesia who believes
that she killed a classmate of hers called Tori Beaugrand. It turns out she
didn’t…and Quicksilver is Tori’s story. The novel takes place a few months
after the events of Ultraviolet. Alison is still in their home town of Sudbury,
Sebastian Faraday (the leading man in Ultraviolet) is nowhere to be seen,
and Tori and her parents have moved across the country and have changed their
names. Now ‘Nikki’, Tori is trying to lead a normal life, devoid of aliens and
freaky space hoo-haa; just a teenage girl working at a supermarket and trying
to finish school. But what kind of story would this be, if that was all that
happened?
Enter Milo
Hwang, a guy who works with Tori. They become friends. Enter the mysterious
Sebastian, back from outer space (did that song just get in your head!? “So
you’re back…from outer space…” Sorry), once again filled with secrets and lies.
Unfortunately, Milo is there when Sebastian materializes out of thin air, and Tori
and Sebastian have to create a story about an underground organisation called Meridian
in order to avoid telling Milo the truth: they aren’t from this world. Dun dun
dun. The person who was out to get Tori in the first book is still hunting her,
and, along with Detective Deckard continuing to investigate why Tori went
missing back in Ultraviolet and a medical unit looking into her abnormal genes,
this is a great read. It’s full of action and road trips, friendship and betrayal,
technology so advance that it blew my mind and at times I had to really slow
down to understand a few things, and a good deal of ‘what could possibly happen
next?’
It was interesting to read of the same characters as before, in Ultraviolet, but looking through the eyes of someone different. I really, really liked Alison's story because she was a synaesthetic - the language and the descriptions of the things that she experiences were really amazing and beautifully written. But after reading a little bit of Tori's voice and her perspective, I realised that I didn't actually mind that it wasn't full of these great sensory descriptions. It wasn't about Alison, after all it was about Tori, and she was a completely different character.
If you haven’t read Ultraviolet, read it. And make sure you read Quicksilver afterwards. Both are great books, and although they are labelled ‘teen’, they aren't all sappy and full of the usual teenage drama that you get in a lot of teen novels, and I think that that’s one of the reasons I love these books so much. That and they’re subtly about aliens…duh.
If you haven’t read Ultraviolet, read it. And make sure you read Quicksilver afterwards. Both are great books, and although they are labelled ‘teen’, they aren't all sappy and full of the usual teenage drama that you get in a lot of teen novels, and I think that that’s one of the reasons I love these books so much. That and they’re subtly about aliens…duh.
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