This Is Not Forgiveness by Celia Rees
Jun. 4th, 2013 11:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Caro
She’s beautiful, impulsive.
And trouble.
Jamie
He wanted her to notice him.
Can’t believe she did.
Rob
Back from Afghanistan. Wounded.
Secretive. Out of reach.
Except with Caro. He lets her in.
Over the course of one summer, their lives collide and entwine with dangerous results.
The brightest flames always leave the deepest scars.
16-year-old Jamie Maguire doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. The youngest of three children, his eldest brother Rob has been invalidated out of the army with a bad leg wound sustained from an IED, and older sister Martha is bound for Cambridge but Jamie has no plans beyond his summer job working punting tourists along the local river.
Then he sees Vanessa ‘Caro’ Carrington in a local café.
She’s beautiful, intelligent and has a wild reputation – rumoured to have been expelled from her last school for having an affair with her art teacher. For the first time he knows what he wants and just has to get her to notice him. But as Jamie grows closer to Caro, he sets off a chain of events that uncovers long buried secrets and sets his brother Rob on an explosive course …
Celia Rees’s YA psychological thriller is a tense, well constructed affair that combines PTSD, teenage obsession, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Red Army Faction ideology. It’s an intelligent, non-judgemental book with insightful characterisation that allows the reader to make up their own mind as to what happened. My only real criticism is that I found the ending far too rushed and would have liked it to unfold more slowly so that the psychological aspects were explored a little more deeply. Other than that, it’s a strong read from the reliable Rees.
Rees gives Jamie, Rob and Caro distinctive voices. I particularly liked the Rob and Caro sections as Rees slowly reveals the situation between them and how the power moves between the two. Jamie is more of an innocent, so caught up in his feelings for Caro and pleased to be with her that he doesn’t see what else is going on.
The mix of Red Army Faction ideology with PTSD is handled in a clever way that shows why Caro’s attracted to it. Although Rob is not a sympathetic character, Rees really brings home what a damaged man he is and how the seeds for that were planted before he went to war. The ending was a little rushed and I thought it suffered through only being from Jamie’s point of view as I would have liked to have seen it from Caro and Rob’s perspective.
That said, this is a taut, intelligent YA read and I’d recommend checking it out.
The Verdict:
Celia Rees’s YA psychological thriller is a tense, well constructed affair that combines PTSD, teenage obsession, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Red Army Faction ideology. It’s an intelligent, non-judgemental book with insightful characterisation that allows the reader to make up their own mind as to what happened. My only real criticism is that I found the ending far too rushed and would have liked it to unfold more slowly so that the psychological aspects were explored a little more deeply. Other than that, it’s a strong read from the reliable Rees.
She’s beautiful, impulsive.
And trouble.
Jamie
He wanted her to notice him.
Can’t believe she did.
Rob
Back from Afghanistan. Wounded.
Secretive. Out of reach.
Except with Caro. He lets her in.
Over the course of one summer, their lives collide and entwine with dangerous results.
The brightest flames always leave the deepest scars.
16-year-old Jamie Maguire doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. The youngest of three children, his eldest brother Rob has been invalidated out of the army with a bad leg wound sustained from an IED, and older sister Martha is bound for Cambridge but Jamie has no plans beyond his summer job working punting tourists along the local river.
Then he sees Vanessa ‘Caro’ Carrington in a local café.
She’s beautiful, intelligent and has a wild reputation – rumoured to have been expelled from her last school for having an affair with her art teacher. For the first time he knows what he wants and just has to get her to notice him. But as Jamie grows closer to Caro, he sets off a chain of events that uncovers long buried secrets and sets his brother Rob on an explosive course …
Celia Rees’s YA psychological thriller is a tense, well constructed affair that combines PTSD, teenage obsession, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Red Army Faction ideology. It’s an intelligent, non-judgemental book with insightful characterisation that allows the reader to make up their own mind as to what happened. My only real criticism is that I found the ending far too rushed and would have liked it to unfold more slowly so that the psychological aspects were explored a little more deeply. Other than that, it’s a strong read from the reliable Rees.
Rees gives Jamie, Rob and Caro distinctive voices. I particularly liked the Rob and Caro sections as Rees slowly reveals the situation between them and how the power moves between the two. Jamie is more of an innocent, so caught up in his feelings for Caro and pleased to be with her that he doesn’t see what else is going on.
The mix of Red Army Faction ideology with PTSD is handled in a clever way that shows why Caro’s attracted to it. Although Rob is not a sympathetic character, Rees really brings home what a damaged man he is and how the seeds for that were planted before he went to war. The ending was a little rushed and I thought it suffered through only being from Jamie’s point of view as I would have liked to have seen it from Caro and Rob’s perspective.
That said, this is a taut, intelligent YA read and I’d recommend checking it out.
The Verdict:
Celia Rees’s YA psychological thriller is a tense, well constructed affair that combines PTSD, teenage obsession, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Red Army Faction ideology. It’s an intelligent, non-judgemental book with insightful characterisation that allows the reader to make up their own mind as to what happened. My only real criticism is that I found the ending far too rushed and would have liked it to unfold more slowly so that the psychological aspects were explored a little more deeply. Other than that, it’s a strong read from the reliable Rees.
