Ever since reading Jackie Morse Kessler’s Hunger, I’ve been meaning to follow up with the sequel. I finally got around to RAGE: Riders of the Apocalypse 2 which continues the premise of having Death — a Kurt Cobain lookalike — recruiting teenagers for the remaining three slots of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (though the protagonists of both books are girls). In Hunger, an anorexic becomes Famine; in this one, Missy is a teenager who relieves a boatload of emotion (bad relationship, death of her cat) by cutting; then Death shows up and suddenly she’s got a much bigger sword and the option to cut other people. The book establishes there’s a high turnover rate in War, Famine and Plague, hence the need for new recruits
From some of the reviews on Goodreads, Kessler does a good job capturing the impulses that lead to cutting. However where anorexia feels connected to Famine, cutting yourself hardly mirrors War. Nor does the book deal with war as much as the first book did starvation — it focuses much more on petty feuds, resentments and small-scale violence. Missy’s big struggles with bullying and slut-shaming at school, plus with her family, don’t connect with the main plot other than to add to her stress. The book does better in the straight Y/A stuff, which is not what I expect to enjoy (I am after all, way aged out of the target market). Not a bad book — I do like that Missy’s family really does have some dysfunction, rather than just her misreading everything, everyone was nice all along (a reveal I rarely like) — but a drop from the first too.
THREE LITTLE WISHES by Paul Cornell and Steve Yeowell is an amusing riff on both rom-coms and three wishes fantasies. Kelly, the protagonist, is a lawyer and a stereotypically sensible, head-centered romantic comedy protagonist, the kind who clearly needs to loosen up and become more of a manic pixie.
Acting on a suggestion by her best friend, Kelly impulsively buys the contents of a storage unit in an online auction, then discovers they include the bottled spirit of Oberon, the faerie king — and releasing him gives her yes, three little wishes. Or big wishes. Well, that can’t possibly go wrong, can it?
In this case, it doesn’t. Cornell asks us to imagine what if the protagonist uses their wishes wisely? What if you don’t regret what you wish for? What if being sensible and thinking before you act is a good thing? I don’t think I’m giving too much spoilers — the fun is in how the creators execute all this — but in any case, the story is fun and worth a look.
Covers by Nick Cardy and Yeowell, all rights to images remain with current holders.
