- miko || 巫女 -

I didn't particularly enjoy this book. The scifi concept is fine, but the style and actual content left a lot to be desired, for me.

Here's the basic concept: colonists on a planet where something causes the population to be able to hear men and creatures thoughts - I specify men because the women don't broadcast any thoughts. The story is set a half generation after colonization, after the women have died out from presumably the same thing that caused "the Noise" but affected them differently.

Without saying too much of the story, the lead character, Todd, is an illiterate 13-year-old with very little breadth of knowledge. Everything is written from his point of view, and it's painful to read - there's almost no coherent descriptions, so the text is basically a string of people speaking to each other and Todd freaking out internally without understanding anything. The illiterate part is relevant because he obtains a journal that would probably clarify a ton of things (and actually be written by someone with more perspective), BUT HE CAN'T READ IT. I felt cheated at being offered that insight and it never being truly delivered.

The actual story was repetitive and "page-turner" style. Run away from the bad guy you don't understand (despite hearing their thoughts), slow down, get attacked including unpleasant description of violence, run away again! x5, I think, with nothing else to temper it. And then it ends on a terribly down point.

Knowing that this is part of a series, I'm fairly certain this book would have been okay if it had been the first third of an actually complete story. By itself, it is the setup and "everything is terrible, how will our heroes survive?" portion of a story, and just repeats itself to fill out a book. I hate this whole "stretch the material from one book into three, because trilogy!" thing that's been happening in books and movies, and as such I won't be attempting the other two books in the series even though I think I'd probably enjoy them more.

The book was well-received (short-listed for the Carnegie medal for young adult fiction), so I don't know if I missed out on something or if I was just in a terrible mood when I read it. But I wouldn't recommend it; there's a lot of better YA scifi out there.