Tour and Review: Shudder, Samantha Durante

This review is part of the Shudder blog tour. Make sure to stop by the main tour page and see all the other blogs participating!

Shudder (Goodreads)
Author:  Samantha Durante (website)

Follow @SamanthaDurante

Rating:

It’s only been three days, and already everything is different.

Paragon is behind her, but somehow Alessa’s life may actually have gotten worse. In a wrenching twist of fate, she traded the safety and companionship of her sister for that of her true love, losing a vital partner she’d counted on for the ordeal ahead. Her comfortable university life is but a distant memory, as she faces the prospect of surviving a bleak winter on the meagre remains of a ravaged world. And if she’d thought she’d tasted fear upon seeing a ghost, she was wrong; now she’s discovering new depths of terror while being hunted by a deadly virus and a terrifying pack of superhuman creatures thirsting for blood.

And then there are the visions.

The memory-altering “stitch” unlocked something in Alessa’s mind, and now she can’t shake the constant flood of alien feelings ransacking her emotions. Haunting memories of an old flame are driving a deep and painful rift into her once-secure relationship. And a series of staggering revelations about the treacherous Engineers – and the bone-chilling deceit shrouding her world’s sorry history – will soon leave Alessa reeling…

Details

Series: Stitch trilogy #2
Genre: YA dystopian sci-fi
Published: Self published June 15, 2013
Pages: 348
My copy: from the author for the tour

Paper copies: Amazon.com • Amazon.co.uk
E-copies:  Amazon.com • Amazon.co.uk • Barnes & Noble • Smashwords

Please note: This is my review for the second book in this series, and so contains spoilers for the first, Stitch. You may wish to read my review for that book instead!

Excerpt

By the time the sun dipped toward the skyline, Alessa and Isaac had wandered through two more vacant neighborhoods, a derelict shopping center, and a downtown area that could only be described as a ghost town.
The pervasive quiet shrouding the once-vibrant village intensified the eerie feeling of being utterly alone. If Alessa hadn’t known what happened, she might have expected families and school kids and zipping cars around every corner. Besides the overgrown shrubbery and the occasional smashed storefront, everything seemed just in its place, waiting for its inhabitants to come home.
It was devastating.
Isaac kicked an empty can which went scuttling along the blacktop ahead, finally coming to rest at the base of a large sign marking the entrance to an expansive lot scattered with cars.
“Mall Parking,” he read aloud.
But what caught Alessa’s attention was the carefully lettered banner crumpled beneath, one corner still nailed to the bottom of the mall sign. She dug the other side out of the snow and held it up, the distinctive red cross painted across the tarp waving in the wind.
“Relief Center,” she added. Alessa gazed at Isaac intently. “Isaac, do you think we found another quarantine zone?”
“Only one way to know for sure – let’s go check it out.”

Review

Alyssa and Isaac have escaped from the Paragon facility on a mission in search of a base for the rebels, but with the threat of the virus still possibly live outside the fences, plus the strange creatures that seem to be stalking them along the way, their mission will not be easy. Meanwhile, inside Paragon a young woman wakes up after an ordeal with no memory of her identity or what happened to her. Newly christened “Phoenix”, she is told the story of the creation of Paragon by the creators themselves, the Developers. They hope she can carry a message to the rebel cause they know she is linked to – they want a truce.

Shudder is an enjoyable follow-up to Stitch, continuing the story of Alyssa and Isaac and their friends trying to resist a repressive society.

It did suffer a bit from the “middle book curse” in that there was a lot of story and character development and not a lot of action – perhaps worse than a normal second book in fact, due to Stitch being mostly set inside the “dramas” so that we don’t get to meet the “real” characters until close to the end. We end up hearing several people’s stories about how they came to be part of Paragon, not to mention the different versions of the actual creation of Paragon told by the Developers. At times I started to lose the thread of who knew what when, but I think by the end everyone was more or less on the same page, so to speak. I’m sure those Developers are up to something dodgy, though!

There are some action scenes through the book though, and they are very tense – sometimes scary! I think this has to be one of the most well-written Indie series I’ve read in a long time. While there is a lot of character development in this story (perhaps a bit too much, even), I did enjoy the further development of Alyssa and Isaac’s relationship. Alyssa’s strange ability to hear thoughts or memories is quite strange and rather baffling – I’ll look forward to hearing what it develops into and how it might be useful.

Overall, Shudder builds towards what I am hoping will be a blockbuster ending to the trilogy. Bring it on!

Warnings: Sexual situations