Book Review: NUM8ERS: THE CHAØS by Rachel Ward

NUM8ERS: THE CHAØS by Rachel Ward

Buy It Now: Amazon: Hardcover
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Series: Yes; my review of NUM8ERS is here
Genre(s): Young Adult/Teen
Publisher: The Chicken House/Scholastic
Available Formats: Hardcover
Description: When he was a little boy, Adam learned about the numbers. The first ones he saw were Jem’s. That was how he knew she was going to die. Adam has more than inherited his mother’s curse: When he looks in someone’s eyes, he not only sees the date of their death…he feels the searing, shocking pain of it. Since Jem died, Adam has lived by the sea with his great-grandmother, Val. But when rising tides flood the coast, they return to London. The city is an alien, exciting, frightening place. Most disturbing of all, Adam can’t help but clock how many people’s numbers are in January 2027; how many are on New Year’s Day. What chaos awaits the world? Can he and Sarah stop a catastrophe? Or are they, too, counted among the “twenty-sevens”?

This review is based on a copy received from the publisher

TDF Pamela’s Review:

Numbers: The Chaos is an excellent sequel. In my opinion, it’s better than the first installment in the series, Numbers, thanks to a smoother pacing, a stronger plot, and strong characters.

Adam is Jem and Spider’s son from the first novel, and now he’s a teenager living in a world that is falling apart. The seas are rising, natural disasters are happening with increasing frequency, and life in England is taking a more totalitarian bend with surveillance everywhere and human beings being chipped like household pets. The setting of this book is even bleaker than that of the first book in the series; there’s little hope to be found anywhere.

Characterization is once again Ward’s strong suit, and I was surprised to find that I actually like the characters in The Chaos better than I did Jem and Spider in the first book. They’re all very well-crafted, realistic teenagers stuck in terrible situations, but I found Adam and Sarah–a pregnant schoolmate of his who is strangely linked to him through her dreams–to be more sympathetic and easier to relate to, despite the fact that none of my own life experiences even come close to what these two have put up with. Adam, who can not only see the date of a person’s death but also how they’re going to die, is frightened both by the horrible things he sees as well as what the numbers seem to be pointing to: a great disaster that rips through London in January 2027. In order to keep his sanity, he writes down all of the things he sees as a way to get it out of his head. I spent most of the book wishing that I could give Adam a hug, or that he’d at least hug his Nan.

Sarah is from a different background than Adam, as well as Jem and Spider from the first book. All of the other characters are from the working class, but Sarah is from a wealthier background. This doesn’t mean she has had any easier of a time growing up. As she’s introduced in the book, I felt a growing sense of horror as the details of her home life slowly came out through her narration. This girl doesn’t deserve any of the awful things that have happened to her, but she’s strangely adaptable and manages to make her own way after running away from home. A lot of that is luck, but she’s a tough, ballsy girl who is willing to do what it takes to take care of herself and her baby.

One of my big complaints about the first book in the series is that the pacing and plot were uneven. Thankfully, the pacing in The Chaos is much smoother, building to a breathless conclusion. The plot is also better, with fewer instances of downtime in the middle of the action, and I was hanging on every word. I actually finished reading the book very late at night because I couldn’t stand to sleep without knowing how it would end.

My only complaint about The Chaos isn’t really a complaint, the more I think about it. The disasters, like the characters’ psychic abilities, aren’t explained. On one hand, I want to know why these things are happening. But as I said, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense that the reader is kept in the dark. None of the characters understand why they have these abilities, and it’s not like there’s someone in the book who sits them down and tells them all about it. The disasters mentioned early in the book, such as the flooded coasts and volcanic eruptions in other countries, aren’t explained because Adam and Sarah aren’t particularly concerned with why they’re happening. As a reader, I can infer that global warming probably plays a part in the rising seas, but these two teenagers in very bad situations aren’t going to sit around, watching the news and thinking about the mechanics behind the disasters. So despite my frustration with being kept in the dark, I can completely understand why Ward has written the book this way, and I think it works.

The book ends on a cliffhanger, and I’m definitely hooked. Numbers: The Chaos is a strong sequel that improves upon everything created in the first novel. I’m looking forward to the third book.

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