Jesse Karp

One time I went on a ghost hunt/walking tour. It was so stupidly bad that my partner and I enjoyed ourselves because we kept poking each other with our elbows and laughing at the absurdity.

This book was kind of similar, except I never once enjoyed it while I was reading. And sometimes the laughing that came out of me sounded like I was dying.

There was one point, near the beginning of Those That Wake, when a character named Laura tries to contact her parents and they act like they don't know her. They tell her they don't have a daughter and how did they get her number and please stop harassing them. That one chapter was super interesting and gave me hope this would be a decent, if at least average, sort of book.

Not much later the book explains that, yes, civilization is crumbling because EVIL CORPORATIONS have INFECTED SOCIETY WITH......MEMES!



“With the improvement of imaging technology and Internet capability in standard cells, people are exposed to this virulence every moment of every day. They now crave the stimulation, to the point that its absence feels undesirable. They are, in effect, addicted to meme transmission, and they don’t even know it.“ -pg. 236

Our intrepid heroes discover this because one of them was an employee for a shady company headed by someone who has hid his identity and location forever. Except after buying one map they find his house immediately where this man in-turn explains to them the entire plot of the book in one soul-melting chapter of boredom and eye rolls.

After anonymous men storm the house trying to kill them, they get out by using an ancient key to start a car. They then head straight to the hidden skyscraper and meet him: THE MEME HIMSELF.

“We are the evolved and evolving species homo sapiens,” Remak countered, “unique and unprecedented. You are only a genus of a species, just another form of meme.” -pg. 282



I’m pretty sure they work together to DEFEAT THE EVIL MEME, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you how that is done, only that one of them doesn’t make it and then people start waking up as the meme starts dislodging itself from their minds.

Just a few days ago I wrote about how I think all books that are published are worth reading because they are the product of someone’s passion and hard work. Those That Wake is seriously messing with my theory. I honestly cannot imagine how this book was published (by Graphia, a subsidiary of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). I feel like a lot of people have a lot of explaining to do. How on earth was this story pitched? Memes are destroying the world and the only ones that can stop them are a privileged white girl, a creepy teenage boxer, a disgruntled high school teacher, and an IRS agent!

… (plus d'informations)

Set in a New York of the near future people are mostly oblivious of each other and the world around them. Instead they choose technology as a constant companion. Cell phones in particular have become essential in their day-to-day existance. Electronic devices have replaced human interaction and people are now reliant on digital media.

A terrorist attack some time after 9/11, called Big Black, caused huge explosions and power outages across New York and the resulting damage (both physical and mental) has never been repaired. The ground level damage has simply been covered over with a huge dome which can be seen for miles around. People say it now contains toxic substances, although there is no concrete evidence. The easiest way to deal with the decay and devestation is to keep their heads down and their eyes averted. The only thing guaranteed to get a person's attention are the huge HD screens which have replaced the windows in the old subway cars. These screens constantly bombard captive audiences on the transport system with advertising campaigns, slogans and infomercials. Corporations now run the entire world and the audiences, who are hooked on digital media, are easy targets.

The story is told from the perspective of 4 unconnected characters. Each has their own story to tell and gradually, by piecing each persons tale together, we come to realise they're all hold answers to help comlplete the big picture. Mal's brother Tommy has disappeared without a trace, Laura has ceased to exist for everyone who has ever known her - including her parents, Mike has found a door in the basement of his school which appears to lead to a place that can't exist and Remak is a secret agent investigating strange occurances in the neighbourhood. These four people are thrown together in strange circumstances and find themselves in a terrifying and bizarre situation and they will all have to work together if they are ever to discover what's really going on....and how to stop it.

The cover is gloomy and depressing and judging by cover alone it looked like it was right up my street. There wasn't a lot to go on, but the blurb led me to believe it might be on the dystopian side so I jumped at the chance to give it a go. This is a debut title so I went into it with an open mind and no high hopes...

It's the kind of book that makes you take a step back and think. It seems to be a cautionary tale and I couldn't help but compare the world I was reading about and our own that I live in. How many gadgets and electronic devices do you use on a daily basis? How quickly would you fall apart without them? Yeah. Me too.

This is a very hard book to pigeon-hole. It's a dystopian, dark fantasy, horror story with liberal doses of science fiction and weirdness thrown in.

From literally the first few pages I was grabbed by the scruff of the neck and flung into the story. As mentioned above I am the slowest reader. Usually. I read this whole book, all 300 pages of it, in a few hours and could not put it down.

I'm a huge dystopian fan, and I liked that this book had that feel to it. In fact, I thought it was purely dystopian at the beginning. As I read on though, things started to take on a menacing air and the horror started to seep in. However, it's not scary blood and gore type horror it's more of a sinister background horror that you only see glimpses of.

The character development is great and I really felt the terror that was bubbling just underneath the surface for each person as their story unfolded. I really felt like I knew these people. I cared about what happened to them and had my fingers crossed that things would work out for them. Likewise the world building is full and realised. I got a real feel for how hopeless and lost everything was. It all seemed dark and grey and dismal but by seeing it through the eyes of Mal, Laura, Mike and Remak I was hopeful that soloutions were just on the horizon if only they could piece together the puzzle. Their characters grew right before my eyes and even Mike (who I wasn't that fond of for most of the story) developed a depth of character that I hadn't seen in the beginning.

I was left guessing all the way through the story. Some new piece of info would be shared and I would think "Ah ha! That's what's behind it all. I bet I know what's coming...." Only to be foiled by another piece of info and taken back to square one.

Now then, the ending, the conclusion and the reveal of all... I have no clue what the hell happened there at the end. Not. A. Clue. It all sort of whooshed over my head and I had a hard time understanding what was said, far less what was happening. I think that has more to do with me than with the story though. The ending is really, really complex and to stop and re-read passages over and over again until I got it would have torn me out of the story so I just trusted that Mr Karp knew what he was on about and took things on trust. Better just to surrender to it and let things unfold.

The only little niggle I have with any of it was that it felt a little preachy at the end. A little bit... The internet and all things globally interactive seem to put us in a great position to interact with each other and broaden our horizons, but actually the world is shrinking and we're becoming even more isolated than when we started. Carry on the way we're going in this age of the internet and all hell will break loose. I get it.

This title is billed for ages 12 but I think it may hold more appeal for a slightly older audience.… (plus d'informations)

This was one weird book. I mean, seriously odd. I was all disposed to like it, what with it being a dystopia and one of the main characters being named Mal (yay for Firefly and Nathan Fillion). Within a few chapters, things started getting strange.

To start with, there is all this stuff about technology, somewhat reminiscent of Awaken, in how dependent people are on television screens and cell phones. Okay, got it. There are also terrorists, apparently, who did something terrible to NYC during the big black. There is the overly strenuous security, always there to hassle you when you're not doing anything wrong, but not there to protect you when you're in trouble. There's the mysterious building that most people can't see that has lots of hallways with doors and a scary button for the top floor. There is also some sort of hyper advertising evil that's endangering the world.

As you can tell, there's a lot happening here, and it really does not come together well. Individually, I like some of what's happening in this novel, but, thrown together, it's just one confusing hodge podge of fighting interspersed with some speeches on one evil or another. Oh yeah, the fighting. There is so much of it in this book. Mal is always punching someone and the descriptions are not always pleasant.

I really just don't know what this book wanted to be. The characterization and plotting both fell completely flat. The writing wasn't awful, but definitely wasn't stellar. This definitely does not rank high for me. People who enjoy violent and frustratingly confusing dystopias (ala James Dashner's trilogy) might enjoy Those That Wake, but it's definitely not for me.
… (plus d'informations)

Dystopian is one of my favorite YA genres! One that I've become completely obsessed with over the summer. So when I read the synopsis for Those That Wake I couldn't get my hands on it fast enough. A dystopian world plus cool futuristic technology, and memories being erased, what could be better? Or so I thought... this book was a huge disappointment and quite frankly not worth the time it took me to drag myself through all 336 pages.

The setting of a book is a huge part of the story. A well-thought out and well described settings helps draw the reader in, as well as bring the story to life. I feel that setting is even more important in dystopian fiction than anywhere else. The world has to be brilliantly created and described to make it believable. With that being said, I don't think the author spent enough time setting up and describing this futuristic New York City and how it came to be. Except for mentions of a terrorist attack known as "the big black" and the ever looming giant dome that now covers part of the city.

I had a really hard time connecting with any of the main characters. Each chapter was written from a different perspective, which made it so that you never really got too deep into the mindset of any one character, instead you got more of an overview, bits and pieces of everyone. When Mal and Laura found themselves in life threatening situations I tried to make myself care, but I honestly couldn't care less weather they survived or not, because I couldn't relate to them on any level.

There was quit a bit of science fiction elements to the story as well as dystopian, which really only worked to confuse me so much so that when the book was over I didn't even know what had really happened.

I know other people have read and really enjoyed this book. I read some good reviews for it beforehand. I guess those people saw something in it that I apparently did not. I would say don't waste your time with this one; cause you can't get that time back.… (plus d'informations)