Jennifer Donnelly is an incredibly talented writer who can make anything, no matter how far-fetched, feel utterly real. My niece first turned me on to this author with the Waterfire Saga, a highly recommended YA series about kick-ass, fighting, mermaid princesses. Yep.
Donnelly brings readers into the emotional present of her characters with such skill that it is difficult to remember who you are once you surface from the depths of her books. With that preface, I found her incredible talent to be a major flaw in my enjoyment of Revolution.
The book follows our heroine, Andi, through a life that has been utterly overthrown. Andi is suicidal and medicated, and through her, the reader gets an all-too-clear understanding of what that looks like.
So this review is first a trigger warning: If you don’t want to be immersed in the feelings of a seventeen-year-old dealing with grief, suicide, and narcotic side effects, this may not be the book for you.
Read Revolution when you can handle these things, on top of the usual YA genre angst, attraction, rejection, and trauma, written with honesty and brutal intensity.
I will spoiler alert that Andi comes out of her trials okay, and there is a satisfying ending. I liked the excellent writing, the depth of feeling, and the realistic characters Donnelly conveys. Her settings and interactions between characters are completely believable.
There isn’t really a plot “twist” in this book, as much as a predictable series of events that were easy for me to see coming as a reader. Our main character Andi can’t see the path though, not because she is a character in the book (horror movie withholding is something I find frustrating) but genuinely due to her character traits: depression, medication, and youth create an inability to think clearly.
Revolution does an excellent job of depicting modern high-school culture, revolutionary France historical drama, and how difficult relationships are in a time of intense grief.
What do you think?