Book blurb: From the author of the Alexa Montgomery Saga, comes a book that will take you into the mind of a genuine psychopath, the lives of six ordinary people, and the world of a very special girl named Joe.
Joe is seemingly an ordinary college student. She works, studies and reads. But in between these activities Joe has a gift that promises to add a dose of color to her life at any given moment. Joe sees things before they happen. Bad things, and the worst thing she has ever faced is just around the corner. Someone is planning a massacre at the college university that Joe attends, and the only person with a hope of stopping the psychopath is her.
Oh, the beauty of foresight. More like a curse. Joe has four days to figure out the mystery, make plans to take down the psycho, and save the lives of people. People like you and me. Ordinary people.
Review
Joe is just a girl – she goes to university, she works at her aunt’s bar and she happens to be able to tell the future. The visions have come to her through the years – either small visions of singular events, or the larger more frightening visions that have her sketching out the carnage she sees. She couldn’t help a friend, stolen from her school by a stranger, or her mother assaulted by her father and set alight. Despite her mother’s survival, she is now agoraphobic and has no relationship to speak of with Joe.
Joe is at her essence her survivor. She lives her life determined to endure, to do what she can when the visions come, but she knows she’s no hero.
But then, her newest vision comes, and she sees the horrors of Virgina Tech and Columbine are due to come to life on her campus. This isn’t a vision she can ignore, and she goes about trying to figure out what she can to stop the massacre.
I don’t really know where to begin with this book – there are different elements that crept up on me as I read it that made me realize it was perhaps more than Joe’s story. But I digress.
Joe is a stutterer, and HD Gordon has very deliberately and carefully given her dialogue that is formal in comparison to any other you would be used too. Compared to the very young surroundings she is in – a university – and situations, dealing with her first crush, the difference to the dialogue is striking and gives her an aura of maturity, and of sadness in a way.
Interspersed with Joe’s POV and her search for the impossible, are the lives of several other minor characters in the days leading up to the massacre she knows is coming – Monday. I think their very normal, everyday situations, flaws, hopes and needs got me. Admittedly, it took some time for me to understand what HDG was trying to do with them, and I couldn’t quite see their purpose at first. But, as Joe’s story evolved, so did theirs and in their small little sections I began to feel for them, to want them to get the things they wanted the most and knowing that all the while on Monday, things would change in ways I couldn’t bear to think about. I couldn’t read ahead and spoil myself to get rid of the dread I had for them, any more than I could stop reading.
The book is not without its surprises, and I wonder if there is another story behind Mr Landry in particular, who proves to be an unexpected source of strength for Joe. Either way, he is as lonely as Joe is, and a kindred spirit. What could they have been had they met if they were younger, I wondered, but he is far too valuable to her right now.
The ending is … I cried, and I tweeted HD Gordon about it, and I like to think she held my hand via Twitter. But the ending is one of those things that’s a punch to the gut, and it will break your heart at the same time.
Stop everything and read this.
Stars: All of them.
