Rage Within - Jeyn Roberts

Rage Within – Jeyn Roberts

Pages: 407

Publisher: Macmillan

Release Date: 30th August 2012 

Edition: UK paperback, review copy

Other Titles in the Series: Dark Inside

After the earthquakes came the infectious rage, turning friends into deadly enemies.

For survivors Michael, Aries, Mason and Clementine the battle to stay alive is about to get even tougher. The new world is organising itself, with camps that promise protection for the uninfected. But the reality of the sites is far more sinister. Besides, nobody is safe from the rage within their own soul...

It’s been a while since I read Jeyn Roberts’ debut so I was a little bit wary of starting Rage Within as I worried that I wouldn’t be able to slip back into the world very easily, and I was right. However, as soon as I did, I didn't want to leave.

Rage Within is written in four main perspectives, Clementine, Michael, Mason and Aries, who we met in book one. This did provide a slight difficulty when I first started reading as there were four characters and back-story that I had to pull from deep in my memory for everything to make sense. Luckily, the events of the Dark Inside were referenced just enough to spark the memories of the characters story arcs and I feel back into their world, but it did take around fifty or so pages for that to happen.

My favourite thing about this series is an additional perspective that is sporadically resent in short chapters through the book: the chapters narrated by ‘Nothing’. In the first book, these chapters seemed to me to represent an abstraction that formed into a sort of group consciousness by the end of the novel and it continued to develop further in Rage Within. Here it became a clearer personality and seemed a lot more human than before, which if I’m honest, made it even more unsettling. But these chapters are exquisitely written. They’re dark, enticing and puzzling. I went through so many ideas of whether it could be a character or if it was something else entirely, and when it was finally revealed, in a roundabout kind of way, I was completely wrong. I do love it when that happens.

As Clementine, Michael, Mason and Aries settled in to their new life at the safe house in Vancouver, some new characters started to appear. Although there were around five or six that had a major role, I instantly fell for one of them: Raj. He was quick-witted and provided some much-needed comic relief to the gang’s stressful days and he never failed to make me smile. He was very well characterised with his idiosyncrasies and likability for someone who we really know very little about and thinking about it, is he all he’s cracked up to be...?

I thoroughly enjoyed Rage Within and although I don’t know for certain if there’ll be another book in this series, I hope there will be!

For my 2012 Dystopian YA Challenge (even though it’s post-apocalyptic...)

Sophie