Tuesday 17 May 2016

Review on The Outliers



When Wylie's best friend, Cassie goes missing, she is determined to find out where she is and bring her back home. With the help of Cassie's boyfriend Jasper, Wylie must follow the clues of Cassie's whereabouts via a series of texts. However, there is more to Cassie's disappearance than meets the eye, and Wylie soon learns that not everyone can be trusted.

The story follows Wylie, a teenager who suffers from anxiety and recently lost her mum due to a car crash. I loved how perfectly Wylie's anxiety was portrayed. I feel as if anxiety is often seen as a quirk rather than a mental illness, so I loved that that was not the case with this book, and we got a good insight to how anxiety affects Wylie's every day life. However, I felt as if more attention could have been put into her being agoraphobic, as I felt as if she was able to leave the house a little too easily, and her anxiety about being in public spaces seemed to quickly disappear.

I felt as if the first quarter of the novel was a little slow, and it didn't really start to pick up until Wylie and Jasper started driving towards where Cassie was telling them to go via text messages. Jasper was by far my favourite character, and I loved how Wylie's first impression of him was completely wrong. Although Wylie initially sees Jasper as a typical high school jock, her feelings towards him change once she realises how much Jasper truly cares about Cassie and how he was trying to talk her out of drinking too much. Jasper is an extremely sweet and caring character, and I felt bad for him, as so many horrible things had happened to him.

Once I had got through the first quarter of the book, it became the action packed thriller I had been hoping it would be and I couldn't put it down! The action packed sequences and plot twists just kept on coming, and although I figured out a couple of plot points before they were revealed, there were still plenty of surprises. I also loved that romance was kept to a minimum, as I'm never a huge fan of romance being a main plot point in this book genre. Although I feel as if a romance developing between Wylie and Jasper at some point is inevitable,  I hope that it will not be too big of a plot point in future books.

The one criticism I do have about this book is that everything seemed a little too unbelievable. I felt as if Wylie and Jasper needed an adult character who genuinely wanted to help them and wasn't going to betray them, as I ended up not trusting any of the new characters that they came across, and with good reason.  I also found that the man allowing Wylie and Jasper to take his truck was both too convenient and too far fetched, as it is extremely unlikely that a stranger would let two teenagers take their truck.

I had a hard time placing this book into a genre, as although the majority of the book fits into the mystery/thriller category, the last quarter of the book included Sci-Fi elements. I found the Outliers storyline a little confusing and felt that it needed a better explanation as to why so many people were after Wylie's dads research, and who North Point were.

I can not believe that this book ended on a cliff hanger! It has definitely made me excited to read the sequel, and I have no idea how I'm going to be able to wait so long for it to come out!  I recommend this book to anyone looking for a fast paced thriller with plenty of plot twists.


No comments:

Post a Comment