Helpful Score: 1
A powerful story with characters I connect with can actually have a physical impact on me - my stomach churns, my heart races, my palms sweat.
That said, after turning the final page of The Rapture by Liz Jensen, I felt like I had just run a marathon. The book is full of emotion, tension, suspense and well-researched information -- all of the ingredients of a great novel.
The Rapture introduces Gabrielle Fox, a beautiful but deeply damaged clinical psychologist. Paralyzed from the waist down, Gabrielle has come to Oxsmith, a hospital for criminally insane youth in Hadporth, England, to start anew personally and professionally. She leaves behind a tragic and traumatic history in London that has left her broken physically and emotionally.
Gabrielle becomes fixated on one of her art therapy patients, 16-year-old Bethany Krall, the daughter of a fanatical Faith Wave pastor who brutally murdered her mother two years earlier. Bethany is having apocalyptic visions of natural disasters worldwide, drawing highly detailed and accurate pictures of events that have yet to happen, from a megahurricane in Brazil to a major earthquake in Istanbul.
Gabrielle spends the rest of the book trying to decipher Bethany's disturbing prophecies, to determine whether the girl is a psychotic or a gifted and to figure out how much she's willing to invest in the visions - and the millions of lives at stake if they're true. The therapist's personal drama is backdropped by scenes of global political upheaval, disease, climate change and social chaos that further whip the book's atmosphere into a frenzy that builds toward a truly unforgettable ending.
I thought Jensen's writing was breathtaking. She uses language that is rich in both imagery and vocabulary -- I think I would have loved the book no matter what its topic, just because of the way the author writes. Her characters are deeply flawed and very human -- although sometimes frustratingly so. Gabrielle is at times infuriating in her self-doubt and paranoia, but her troubled psyche is key to the plot.
The story is sometimes painful to read, and Jensen doesn't pull her punches. This is apocalyptic fiction, folks. Don't expect a sunshine-and-rainbows ending. The events contained within are disturbing and realistically plausible, and have very well given me something else to sit up at night worrying about. Jensen's end-of-days horror is not a recycled asteroid-hits-Earth scenario, but a well-researched threat that I'll look forward to reading more about in the future.
Jensen does infuse the end of The Rapture with a shred of bittersweet hope for the future, uncertain and difficult as it may be for her characters, and the world.
That said, after turning the final page of The Rapture by Liz Jensen, I felt like I had just run a marathon. The book is full of emotion, tension, suspense and well-researched information -- all of the ingredients of a great novel.
The Rapture introduces Gabrielle Fox, a beautiful but deeply damaged clinical psychologist. Paralyzed from the waist down, Gabrielle has come to Oxsmith, a hospital for criminally insane youth in Hadporth, England, to start anew personally and professionally. She leaves behind a tragic and traumatic history in London that has left her broken physically and emotionally.
Gabrielle becomes fixated on one of her art therapy patients, 16-year-old Bethany Krall, the daughter of a fanatical Faith Wave pastor who brutally murdered her mother two years earlier. Bethany is having apocalyptic visions of natural disasters worldwide, drawing highly detailed and accurate pictures of events that have yet to happen, from a megahurricane in Brazil to a major earthquake in Istanbul.
Gabrielle spends the rest of the book trying to decipher Bethany's disturbing prophecies, to determine whether the girl is a psychotic or a gifted and to figure out how much she's willing to invest in the visions - and the millions of lives at stake if they're true. The therapist's personal drama is backdropped by scenes of global political upheaval, disease, climate change and social chaos that further whip the book's atmosphere into a frenzy that builds toward a truly unforgettable ending.
I thought Jensen's writing was breathtaking. She uses language that is rich in both imagery and vocabulary -- I think I would have loved the book no matter what its topic, just because of the way the author writes. Her characters are deeply flawed and very human -- although sometimes frustratingly so. Gabrielle is at times infuriating in her self-doubt and paranoia, but her troubled psyche is key to the plot.
The story is sometimes painful to read, and Jensen doesn't pull her punches. This is apocalyptic fiction, folks. Don't expect a sunshine-and-rainbows ending. The events contained within are disturbing and realistically plausible, and have very well given me something else to sit up at night worrying about. Jensen's end-of-days horror is not a recycled asteroid-hits-Earth scenario, but a well-researched threat that I'll look forward to reading more about in the future.
Jensen does infuse the end of The Rapture with a shred of bittersweet hope for the future, uncertain and difficult as it may be for her characters, and the world.
