Book Review: Rage by Jackie Morse Kessler

Title: Rage
Author: Jackie Morse Kessler
Publisher: Graphia
Release Date: 04/18/2011
ISBN: 0547445288





If you've read Kessler's first book Hunger, you know how well she is at packing quite a bit of story in such a small amount of pages. If you haven't then you really should give her a try- her books really are incredible.

When Missy isn't feeling good about herself, there's one thing she can count on to make it all go away. It lives in a little white box in her closet & it is always there & never lets her down, unlike some of the people around her. Her sister treats her like an embarassment. Her parents barely seem to acknowledge her. Her friends have all but abandoned her. And the guy she thought she knew? He's hurt her in ways she never thought possible. Missy swears that she'll never cut again but when a cruel prank causes her to run to her little white box, she finds that she's been tapped to become the entity of War, a being that knows all about pain & suffering.

I've been lucky enough to have been able to read Hunger, so I was thrilled when I also got the chance to review Rage as well & ended up reading it all in one sitting. Kessler really does have a strong storytelling ability to her & readers will really be able to feel Missy's pain & anguish. While Hunger's weakness was that there wasn't a lot of information about the background of the characters contained within it, Kessler has managed to work out most of that problem in this book. There's more depth & background to the characters, more explanation of what makes their personal issues hit them so hard.

However where some readers will get frustrated is in what exactly the Horsemen are responsible for. You know that they're the embodiment of their station & that they can influence how things unfold, but not much information is really given about how it all happens. It all comes out in a rather confusing jumble, which may or may not be on purpose.

This is still an awesome book & Kessler remains someone I'll be reading in the future. I'm pretty curious to see how the rest of the series plays out, as there's two more Horsemen for the books to focus on. Haven't read Hunger? No worries, you can pretty much read Rage without having read the previous book, but you'd be missing out on a good tale.

(ARC provided by NetGalley)