I’m going to tread lightly with this review, since few books I’ve read in recent years require the reader to have such a miniscule amount of information about the plot for full enjoyment. Author Scott Sigler even includes a letter to readers at the conclusion of the novel, asking readers not to share too many details about the novel’s plot. So, here’s my attempt at that for his young adult science fiction novel Alive.
Before I talk about Alive, I’m going to step back a bit with Scott’s oeuvre and briefly mention his novels Infected and Contagious. Scott offered those two audio books, for which he was the narrator, for free as podcast novels. I was just getting into audiobooks at the time, they were free so I tried them. I enjoyed them immensely, great sf thrillers with a nice twist on the alien invasion premise. At their heart, those books were fun entertainments. With Alive, I feel like Scott upped his game. It isn’t always easy (at least for this relative and at the time very neophyte audiobook consumer) to get an idea of an author’s prose, listening to the book makes it a bit challenging to linger over the page and consume the prose with as much in-depth consideration. Even with that disclaimer, I think Scott’s prose here in Alive was a strength, and his use of the first person narrative was very engaging and helped me to finish reading the book in just a couple of days.
The premise starts with this: a 12-year old girl wakes up in a dark place on what she thinks is her birthday. She comes to realize she is in a coffin, but she has no concrete memories of who she is but sees what she assumes is her name “M. Savage” on the coffin. Some memories of moments enter her mind, but nothing really informing her of her identity or situation. She realizes she is not the only person in a coffin as a voice comes from another locked coffin in the room. Em (as she comes to calling herself) realizes her body is no longer that of a 12-year old girl. To reveal too much more of the plot beyond that would violate the unwritten/unsigned agreement I made with Scott Sigler when I finished the book.
What I can say is that this novel was supremely gripping with enough clues along the way that sousing out what is actually happing is rewarding and fun. Em became a character I could empathize with very quickly, and reading of her plight as she experienced it added to the tension and narrative magnetism of the story. Sigler’s approach to the story put me very much in the story. Because of that, through significant portions of the narrative, I felt as if I was playing a Dungeons & Dragons game, walking down the mysterious corridors with very little knowledge of what lurked in the shadows and behind each corner.
Each reveal in the story raises more questions than the reveal answers, but Sigler managed a balancing act that prevented these new questions from being annoying as could easily have been the case. Em and the second person she helps to escape the closed coffin are far from the only characters in Alive, and Sigler balances out the cast nicely. Some characters fit their roles almost too perfectly, but on the whole, as the cast expands, the novel becomes a richer, more entertaining experience to see how Em fits in with all of them.
The ending was a bit expected, given all that led up to it, but it worked so well I wouldn’t want it changed. More importantly, the journey to it was great. Alive is a novel that exceeded my expectations and had me fully engrossed in Em’s plight from beginning to end. The second instalment in The Generations Trilogy, Alight, can’t come soon enough.
Highly recommended.
Hardcover, 368 Pages | 9780553393101
Published by Del Rey, July 2015
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
http://scottsigler.com/book/alive/
