I love dystopian fiction, so when I see a totalitarian ruler, some weird technology or addictive substance, a subservient people and the potential for a hero to rise up and take it down, I need to buy it. Check out this book review to learn more.
"The Orange City" is the story of a man called Graham who lives in a city of ex-cons who have been given a second chance. The city is controlled by a multi-armed man called the Man. He has a tight grip on the people here, but wants to control the one thing he doesn’t yet have of them - their emotions. So, he creates a drink that does exactly that, but he needs a guinea pig. Enter Graham. I won’t give you more because I don’t want to give spoilers, but as you might tell, it’s a pretty out there story.
But in an odd way, it kinda works…
Now, a few things to note. Having just come from the poetically perfect A.K Blakemore’s Manningtree Witches, the writing style of this book stabbed me in the heart. I’m usually pretty relaxed when it comes to writing quality as we are not all the greats, though we will always strive to be, but we just don’t have it in the locker. So for we mere humans, I’m willing to give leeway to a few sloppy sentences here and there. However, the sloppiness, the telling not showing, the unnecessary qualifiers were littered throughout. I also felt the final 30 pages where the big reveal was given was basically an information dump, which reminded me of Matrix Reloaded when Neo went in that room and The Architect explained everything. Yawn. So what kept me reading this story? Two reasons.
To learn: As a reader, there’s way too many books out in this world to stick with mediocre ones, but as a writer, it’s not only useful to read the greatest ever books out there as something to aspire to, but to read the not good ones to learn how to make your book better than it. It’s actually quite reassuring knowing that this book has been traditionally published and you can spot how you could make it better. This means that I could make my book better than this standard, giving me that glimmer of hope of publication.
The story: I wasn’t much into the characters. None of them really stood out to me, except E possibly. He was quite a complex character who had a kind of fake authority about him, which was interesting. But what kept me coming back, in a really weird way, was that I wanted to know what happened next. As odd as the story was, it made me keep turning the page. I wanted to know more about the drinks and how they affected Graham, which took up the middle of the book. This was creative and the author used colour well, and by the time I’d got through the middle, well of course I needed to finish the book. I remember when acting legend Sir Alec Guinness was asked why the hell he’d take on such a silly story as Star Wars, and Guinness simply replied, “I couldn’t stop turning the page”. Sometimes it’s simply a good story that can convince the audience to stick around.
So there it is, Orange City. It was fine, I’m glad I read it but unless you’re really into dystopian fiction, fizzy drinks and men with many limbs, then it might not be your thing.
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