Fav. book of fav. series: Simple.
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars.
Rage by Kessler, Jackie Morse
It is a very rare occasion indeed when I find the need to rate a book the highest score possible. Few novels have actually captured my full attention so complexly, has never created a world so vivid with the harsh realities of our modern day world, that it left me no option than to give it five stars. The author spent some large amounts of time editing, proof-reading while also making sure the integrity of the books underlying purpose was not mistaken. Kessler made she her words were curt, terse, and frank. And you know me, give me a novel such as this that holds such powerful emotion in every verse, and I crumble into mush.
Without out doubt the one of the most powerful novels I've read. With her stark realism, her in-depth reasoning behind such a tragedy and the composure that Kessler manages to portray in her main character Missy.
Missy is just a normal, high school kid, with parents that are too busy with there careers to notice her existence, and with a sister whose desperate need to climb that social hierarchy ladder sickens Missy to no end. Then finally it seems this girl with a shell as hard as a diamond has caught herself a break. Her football star of an ex-boyfriend, whom after seeing the horrific inter-lacing scars of her cutting dumps her, invites her personally to a party in the front of his nasty 'possy' she has nothing else to do but go. Right? Especially since the said ex-boyfriend has been strangely nice to her lately, stopping his friends even from calling her 'cutter-slut'. Despite her internal clock ticking rhythmically along with the phrase of 'the party is a bad idea', Missy goes anyway, her desire to have some fun outweighing the dread she feels.As it turns out, Missy should have defiantly stayed home. When a cruel joke leads Missy to slit her wrists a little too deep this time than normal, Missy thinks she's done for. Until she remembers him. The man with the sword! His words coaxing her to her knees, the drum of her heat-beat slowing as her life slowly ebbs away and onto her white carpeted bedroom-floor.
The day before a man came to her doorstep and gave her a beautiful sword that seemed to radiate power, control, strength, and most important a rage so potent it has the capability to destroy entire civilization and that is just what it wants to do, unless Missy can finally find the control she's always lacked, always sought after but never fully grasped in her palms.
"Thou art the Red Rider." Yeah, okay I'm not going to believe some man who shows up on my doorstep proclaiming to be death, a man who gives me an ancient sword, and says I am to go out in the world as a rider of the apocalypse. Was he insane?
But, lying on her bedroom floor Missy realizes that the sword, her sword is calling to her, urging her forward through the drowning waters of her fading life. Finally just as her vision fades black the swords hilt falls into the palm of her hand. The next day Missy wakes up, she alive. It is not until the next day of school that she realizes why she so desperately needed to cut so deep. And the harsh realism is enough to send her over the edge, possibly taking her student body with her as fits of rage leek out of her and into them. Missy must gain control before she truly dies, because it is only the sword that saved her from her fate, and in a world parallel to hers the rules are very simple: except your position as a rider of the apocalypse, or submit to death.
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