Nina @ Death Books and Tea

Review: I enjoyed the first book in the Furnace series and for some reason never carried on. I thought it would be interesting to see what else Alexander would come up with. It’s different in some ways (for example, no prisons, a little supernatural twist), but it’s similar that it’s what you’d definitely call “a boy’s book”.So, one day, all Cal’s friends try to kill him.Daisy’s friends try to kill her. Brick’s girlfriend violently attacks him. For some reason, everyone wants to kill these and some other teenagers, and there’s not really much they can do to stop it. Somehow, they band together with other people in similar circumstances, and must find out what’s happening and what they can do to stop it. But what they do find will change their perspectives on everything. This isn’t the clearest of summaries. It could be anything. But I was hoping for a lot of action, which I definitely got.The plot is set up very quickly. There’s purpose to everything that happens, and being a 500 page book, that’s a lot. There are some things I’m not entirely sure about. There seems to be teenagers from all over the country who manage to get to Furyville on their own, which I’m not sure if that would be possible and there’s not much explaining it, and there were a few other things that were a bit “wait, what?” and not really connected to the main reveal at the end.The three main characters were well developed at the start, but I think some of the characters that were introduced later like Adam and Rilke could have had a little bit more work on them. They did get backstories, but I just didn’t really care for some of them.I like the way that each chapter 1)focused on a character and 2)had day, place and time clearly defined. It made it a lot easier to keep track of everything. The action scenes were really well written-fast, and kept you reading on. I read this in an entire sitting (mainly because there was nothing else to do on a six hour ferry ride from France where all your friends are asleep or watching The Muppets) and just couldn’t put it down. Everything was really well described, you may have well have been there, and there was some kind of action happening every few pages.The big thing at the end was a little anti-climatic, but once you’d got used to it, you liked it. It left me with questions that I’m hoping will be answered in book 2, because the general concept is very different to what you’d expect from this kind of book and the way the rest of the book had been playing out.Overall: Strength 4 tea to a book that is action action action throughout that kept me gripped from the start.