The Bodies We Wear (The Bodies We Wear #1)
by Jeyn Roberts
Publication: 23rd September 2014
Publisher: Knopf Books For Young Readers
Pages: 368
Genre: Dystopian/Paranormal/Contemporary
Age Appropriate: Young Adult
Buy It: Amazon | B&N | The Book Depository
A streetwise girl trains to take on a gang of drug dealers and avenge her best friend’s death in this thriller for fans of Scott Westerfeld and Robin Wasserman.
People say when you take Heam, your body momentarily dies and you catch a glimpse of heaven. Faye was only eleven when dealers forced Heam on her and her best friend, Christian. But Faye didn’t glimpse heaven—she saw hell. And Christian died.
Now Faye spends her days hiding her secret from the kids at school, and her nights training to take revenge on the men who destroyed her life and murdered her best friend. But life never goes the way we think it will. When a mysterious young man named Chael appears, Faye's plan suddenly gets a lot more complicated. Chael seems to know everything about her, including her past. But too many secrets start tearing her world apart: trouble at school, with the police, and with the people she thought might be her friends. Even Gazer, her guardian, fears she's become too obsessed with vengeance. Love and death. Will Faye overcome her desires, or will her quest for revenge consume her?
People say when you take Heam, your body momentarily dies and you catch a glimpse of heaven. Faye was only eleven when dealers forced Heam on her and her best friend, Christian. But Faye didn’t glimpse heaven—she saw hell. And Christian died.
Now Faye spends her days hiding her secret from the kids at school, and her nights training to take revenge on the men who destroyed her life and murdered her best friend. But life never goes the way we think it will. When a mysterious young man named Chael appears, Faye's plan suddenly gets a lot more complicated. Chael seems to know everything about her, including her past. But too many secrets start tearing her world apart: trouble at school, with the police, and with the people she thought might be her friends. Even Gazer, her guardian, fears she's become too obsessed with vengeance. Love and death. Will Faye overcome her desires, or will her quest for revenge consume her?
My Thoughts.
The Bodies We Wear is ultimately a story about revenge, of Faye who at the age of eleven was forced to take the drug Heam, which shuts your body down for a brief time, almost deathlike, if you're lucky you live or the other outcome is death, whilst under this drug high you purportedly glimpse heaven.This is not so for Faye who sees hell and believes that's where she's headed, when her best-friend Christian is also forced to consume the drug he is not so lucky and he dies, vowing to avenge his death she's spent the last six years learning to fight and trailing her assailants of that fateful night all those years ago, so that when the time comes she'll kill them all.
It's while out keeping tabs on the ringleader Rufus one night that she meets Chael, a good looking guy her age who seems familiar, he also seems to know an awful lot about her, and when we find out why that is, it will shock you completely, and will change the direction of the story we thought we were getting.
Living with her guardian Gazer, she attends school on a scholarship, but people like Faye who have overdosed on Heam are ostracised, and although the school forbids the students from knowing anything about her, they have rules she has to follow including no fraternising with other students or else she will be kicked out, and with no other school willing to take her, she needs to be on her best behaviour at all times, to graduate and prove to the faculty that just because she overdosed doesn't mean she can't try to make something of herself.
This was a very interesting and captivating story, almost like a dystopian with its world under the grip of the Heam epidemic with no law enforcement able to control the dealers or stop the distribution of the drug, with a smidgeon of paranormal all set in a contemporary setting.
I'm excited to see where this series goes, once you pick this book up it's almost as addictive as Heam, and way too hard to put down, very, very enjoyable.
I give this 4/5 stars.
JEYN ROBERTS is the author of Dark Inside and Rage Within. Her first story was published in a middle-grade anthology called Let Me Tell You when she was sixteen. She graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in writing and psychology and received her MA from the prestigious creative-writing graduate course at Bath Spa University. Jeyn is a former singer, songwriter, actress, bicycle courier, and tree planter. Her favorite authors include Betty Smith, J. K. Rowling, Ernest Hemingway, Douglas Coupland, and Jonathan Stroud, and her five favorite books of all time are A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Girlfriend in a Coma, Memoirs of a Geisha, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and Harry Potter. Jeyn lives in Canada. Visit her at www.jeynroberts.com or follow her on twitter at @JeynRoberts.