Numbers by Rachel Ward

Buy It Now: on Amazon.com

Description: Since her mother’s death, fifteen-year-old Jem has kept a secret. When her eyes meet someone else’s, a number pops into her head – the date on which they will die. Knowing that nothing lasts forever, Jem avoids relationships, but when she meets a boy called Spider, and they plan a day out together, her life takes a new twist and turn. Waiting for the London Eye, she sees everyone in the queue has the same number – something terrible is going to happen. (from the author’s website)

This review is based on a free review copy received from the publisher.

TDF Pamela’s Review:

I know I tend to quibble over genre classifications, but I can’t help it. As cluttered as I am, I do like to neatly categorize things. I tell myself it’s OCD, heh. My nonfiction bookcase is divided up by subject, and that drives my mother crazy. Of course, she likes to organize her books by size, which makes my eyelid twitch so…

Numbers is one of those books that’s difficult to classify. I’ve seen it advertised as science fiction, but it’s definitely not that. Amazon has it listed as “Spine-Chilling Horror,” which made me laugh. That’s a genre? Awesome! The book follows Jem, the protagonist, who for as long as she can remember has seen numbers when she looks at people. Those numbers just happen to be the date that person will die, and unfortunately for Jem, she realized this after her mother’s death of an overdose. After being shunted around the foster care system in London, Jem has become a withdrawn, troubled teenager who refuses to make friends. Why bother, she thinks, when they’re just going to die on her anyway?

But she finds herself drawn to Spider, one of her classmates, and Jem begins to think of him as a friend despite knowing that his numbers show that he only has a few weeks to live. When the two witness a terrorist attack on the London Eye–after Jem realizes that everyone in line has that day’s date as their numbers, she and Spider run for it, stealing cars and walking across the countryside to try to escape from the bleakness of their lives in London. Unfortunately, the police are looking for them as witnesses to the bombing, and since they’re both troubled kids, they know the system isn’t going to be kind to them.

This is one of those books that I feel strange saying I enjoyed. It’s a bleak book with very little hope to it, and that’s one of its strongest points. The majority of YA/teen books I’ve read end with at least a glimmer of hope, even if they’re incredibly depressing. It feels like publishing companies need to impart some sort of “keep your chin up” message to their young readers, as if every piece of literature written for anyone under the age of 21 should be used as a tool for teaching. While I think that readers of all ages can and often should learn something from what they read, I am completely against the idea that books for children and teenagers should be didactic. I think fiction should be entertaining, and if the reader learns something, more power to them.

Numbers is not a book about learning to navigate the foster care system and becoming a well-adjusted adult as a result of what you’ve learned. It’s about a girl who is very, very messed up, and understandably so. She found her mother dead of an overdose at a young age, and has been basically neglected by the system ever since. On top of that, she knows when every single person she meets is going to die. That would screw up even the most well-adjusted individual. Jem actually irritated me at points, particularly when she and Spider are having to walk cross-country. She spends a lot of that time complaining and whining, and while it was annoying, it also fit her perfectly. She’s a teenager who has never been out of London before. While she’s not accustomed to an easy life, she’s certainly not used to having to slog through mud and go hungry. Her actions and reactions make perfect sense, even as she starts to mature and realize exactly what is going on around her.

Ward’s characters are by far the strongest aspect of this novel. Even the supporting characters, like Jem’s foster mother and Spider’s grandmother, while not entirely fleshed out, still made me feel like they had personalities that Jem only sees peripherally. Spider, too, is nicely fleshed out even from Jem’s point of view. You get a sense of his way of thinking, his problems with the world, with being viewed with suspicion because he’s a black teenage boy in predominantly-white Britain.

This brings me back to the bleakness of Numbers. It is highly effective because it isn’t the kind of book that will wrap everything up neatly, after school special style. If it had ended with sunshine and daisies and everything’s a-ok, I would have felt cheated. This isn’t a story that needs a happy ending, and it’s definitely better served by not having one at all.

However, this isn’t to say that the novel doesn’t have problems. While the characterization and tone are great, the plot and pacing are uneven. The story moves along at a good clip for the first part, but when Jem and Spider go on the run, it starts to get bogged down, and by the time they’re caught, I found myself wishing that something big would happen, just to break up the monotony. The ending itself, while satisfying in that it fit the tone of the rest of the novel, did seem a bit contrived, as if it relied a bit too much on a “make the reader gasp” ploy.

The biggest flaw, for me, was that Ward just didn’t do enough with the numbers. She makes references to psychic powers–Spider’s grandmother can see auras–but by the end of the book, the numbers went nowhere. I see a lot of people referring to this book as science fiction or paranormal, and I just can’t agree with those labels. Jem’s ability to see the death numbers could have been an amazing twist to the story; why can she see the numbers, for example? What’s the spur behind these psychic powers? Unfortunately, this is never addressed, and I felt like the numbers just trailed off into nothingness.

Despite this, I did find this an enjoyable read. I finished it off over the course of a day, and it did keep me hanging on. I was up way too late trying to finish it because I didn’t want to have to wait until morning. It’s a solid debut for Rachel Ward, and I think her writing will only improve.