The government is trying to curb benefit payments and is using the poorest families as a scapegoat - if teenagers don't have a job to go to or definite further education plans then they will be sterilised to stop them getting a family and becoming a burden. Clearly this is a very unpopular measure and ADAM and EVE orchestrate demonstrations against the Bill. ADAM and EVE protect their real identities closely and in EVE's case this is because she is, in fact, Tia Thompson - daughter of the minister whose Bill this actually is! But demonstrations are something the government will not tolerate and they are prepared to use extreme force to suppress.
As with SIEGE, the reader hits the ground running and the pace hardly lets up as we twist and turn on the way to the final pages.
There are certain similarities to SIEGE but I found RIOT a much better book - not that I didn't enjoy SIEGE because I did - but somehow the author felt more at ease in the writing of RIOT, both of the tender scenes and the violence.
I found that I could never 'believe' in Tia and when certain facts are revealed about her tastes at various times, I thought "Oh, I wouldn't have thought that!". (I did find myself, a lot of the time,thinking of her as a young man!) The only character I found myself thinking of as 'real' though was her father in all his vileness! But none of this mattered because with the pace of the story I didn't get time to stop and think about it at all.
The book is based around a government plot that is so extreme we can easily accept this as fiction but when you stop to consider the power base that the government enjoys you are left wondering if one day...
A great read in which the pages fly by.
Publisher - Hodder Childrens
Genre - Teen thriller
Buy Riot
from Amazon
No comments:
Post a Comment