Book Reviews

BOOK REVIEW FOR STRUCK BY JENNIFER BOSWORTH

Link to Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12432229-struck

Title: Struck

Author: Jennifer Bosworth

Hardcover – 373 pages

Mia Price is a lightning addict. She’s survived countless strikes, but her craving to connect to the energy in storms endangers her life and the lives of those around her.

Los Angeles, where lightning rarely strikes, is one of the few places Mia feels safe from her addiction. But when an earthquake devastates the city, her haven is transformed into a minefield of chaos and danger. The beaches become massive tent cities. Downtown is a crumbling wasteland, where a traveling party moves to a different empty building each night, the revelers drawn to the destruction by a force they cannot deny. Two warring cults rise to power, and both see Mia as the key to their opposing doomsday prophecies. They believe she has a connection to the freak electrical storm that caused the quake, and to the far more devastating storm that is yet to come.

Mia wants to trust the enigmatic and alluring Jeremy when he promises to protect her, but she fears he isn’t who he claims to be. In the end, the passion and power that brought them together could be their downfall. When the final disaster strikes, Mia must risk unleashing the full horror of her strength to save the people she loves, or lose everything.

To start: the blurb. Ohmigush, as I say. I believe that I saw this as a recommended book from my friend Megan’s blog, so I decided to put it on preorder. I got it as soon as it was released and I finished reading it that day because it was so good! My mother and I had to run errands, so I was walking down aisles in the grocery store with my nose in a book, literally.

The only thing I can ‘complain’ about (and it’s not really complaining, because I think it’s cool how Ms. Bosworth did this) is that when I picked it up, I expected a realistic fiction about a girl who is struck by lightning multiple times. What I got instead was a trip through a strange ‘new’ religion created by a blind man who claims to be a prophet of God (excuse me, THE prophet), a group that is anti-Prophet, a girl who is addicted to lightning, and so much more!

First of all, the characters. Oh, my gosh, I could really feel the emotions that Mia and the other characters were feeling. And, more importantly, when the lightning struck, I could feel the air vibrating, the ground shaking, the heat of the electricity running through me. The descriptions and feelings were realistic enough that I could have stepped into the pages and lived there. But I wouldn’t really want to, considering the fact that they’re living in Los Angeles after an earthquake tore up the city and destroyed almost everyone. It tried to kill Mia’s mother by trapping her under a building.

The book starts out with Mia’s ‘dream,’ which it really isn’t, where a boy breaks into her room to stab her. She writes it off as a dream when he disappears, him dropping the knife in the floor and leaving a mark. But when she wakes up the next morning and looks at the spot where the knife fell, there’s the same mark. She gets up, goes to school with her brother after assuring her hermit mother, who refuses to leave her room after the earthquake, and meets Katrina, one of the members of the anti-Prophet group. To skip the explaining of everything that goes on between them, Katrina invites Mia to their ‘meeting’ that night at the school.

Also on her first day, she meets Jeremy, the ‘love interest.’ Some might call this instalove, but I guess it depends on the person. I think that the love development was just right, but I’m not one of the major instalove haters.  I think it has just the right amount of attraction at the beginning and it builds up. At least it isn’t ‘they meet, they say hello, they kiss.’ They actually make their way from strangers to in-love in the span on three hundred seventy pages. Not too instalove in my opinion, but also, the books takes place in three days, then skips a little while before showing Jeremy and Mia happily ‘in love.’

My favorite part in the entire book has to be near the end, when Mia is doing the heroine-saves-the-day at the end with the Prophet. I don’t know why, but when Mia is at the Tower and has just been *SPOILER* shot full of lightning, Jeremy goes to her to help her and she can’t because she’s still ‘too hot.’  I think it’s amazing in descriptions and emotions, even though it’s only about a page long. I just love how Ms. Bosworth wrote it.

Overall, this is one of my favorite books. The characters, plot, descriptions, everything is well done. Even the writing, just how it’s written, is amazing. Out of all the amazing books I’ve read, I give this a four and a half out of five. 

*As seen in the August issue of The Blue Afro Hairdo*