The Calling - James Frey

I rated this 4/10

Twelve thousand years ago, they came. They descended from the sky amid smoke and fire, and created humanity and gave us rules to live by. They needed gold and they built our earliest civilizations to mine it for them. When they had what they needed, they left. But before they left, they told us someday they would come back, and when they did, a game would be played. A game that would determine our future.

I wasn't sure about this book. The short sentences and tendency to 'list' ("We came here, we have been here, and we are here now." "But we are not together. We are not friends. We do not call one another, and we do not text one another...") felt quite jarring to me. I also wasn't keen on the use of present tense to tell the tale (personal preference of course, it has the opposite effect of drawing me in and I find it distracting). I also felt that maybe James Frey had written this book solely with the big screen in mind. It reads like a film script, switches back and forth between players with more than a little similarity to Battle Royale and The Hunger Games.

Having said this, I found myself slowly being drawn into the book - more for the characters than the plot. They were good enough, all different in their own right, with Jago standing out the most for me as being well rounded and believable. Chiyoko was fascinating, but why would she clap her hands "yes" and not just nod her head?! Chris and Sarah however, were the usual 'too good to be true' protagonists that I felt were flat and uninteresting.

I wasn't madly taken by Endgame - a lot of incidents felt forced and I couldn't get around the fact that the Endgame was not made public knowledge, causing outright war between nations... I also couldn't get my head around Chiyoko using sex as a weapon (this is YA fiction, we shouldn't be glamorising that), and that An's disability is not portrayed in a good light at all; in fact, quite the opposite.

I read it quickly and it was quite addictive. I can see people who liked The Hunger Games perhaps enjoying this too, but I'm not sure I would be 100% happy recommending this to teenagers.