She absolutely believes in purgatory now, knows first-hand all about purgatory, and it has a linoleum floor and Formica tables and no windows and a phone that doesn't ring.
Three Hours
by Rosamund Lupton
Genre: Thriller
About: In a liberal arts school the day starts as any other. English classes, pottery, a dress rehearsal for Macbeth... students go about their day. But as snow falls, a bomb goes off and gunmen take over the corridors.
The Good
This is a good, fast-paced thriller with a lot of suspense. It does the Alfred Hitchcock style that allows you to guess key moments before the other characters catch on - such as Jamie being one of the gunman, or their being a bomb in the theatre. Suspecting these things early on made me want to scream at the characters in the absolute best way possible.
I really liked the author's choice of POVs. The spotlight is not given to the teenage terrorists, it's given to the people affected by their violence and the bravery with which they meet it. This is a story about love and bravery and Lupton does a fantastic job of making you feel visceral disgust toward Victor and Jamie - in ways this is a stronger emotion, I think, to hate or fear. Of course we hate what they're doing and fear for the characters they're terrorizing, but Lupton evokes disgust by giving us flashbacks of Rafi and Basi's journey to England. Their traumatic past, the war they had to flee, the dangers they faced as asylum seekers and how human they made that journey, contrasts dramatically to Victor and Jamie's lives. The sheer audacity and unbelievable arrogance they have in trying to inflict suffering to Rafi and Basi, after what they've already endured, turns their plan into something so outrageously indulgent, so irrelevant and selfish that the cruelty of it is almost secondary to the disgust we, as readers, feel that this hate exists.
So she did a great job at making me care about the characters. There were some really beautiful similes and metaphors that, at times, were perhaps a little too poetic, but were nonetheless very evocative. Rafi talking about the foil blankets making them chocolates in a box, or the idea of poetry lines being in white ink only showing up when the page is darkened... I liked a lot of the small moments and reflections that characters had.
The Bad
Although the story is fast-paced, the writing did read a little clunky to me. I'm not sure why as I liked the writing style, but there was something about the flow that made me have to re-read passages to place myself there. I also was not a fan of the dialogue. A lot of it read like characters explaining events too much. Like the author trying to flatten out potential plot holes, brainstorm the situation, or summarise things for the reader.
The Somewhat Iffy
I am very happy that so many people were saved. I am. But the book sets up very clearly that this is a thriller on a large scale. Hundreds of lives are at stake. A terrorist group along with a highly intelligent psychopath have plotted this out it and police do not work out the clues in time. Yet virtually everyone survives. The headmaster, a cop and the two terrorists are the only casualties. Although this was the outcome I was rooting for (sorry Mr Marr), it didn't satisfy me to read and I think that's because once you know the bomb is in the theatre, you are expecting everyone in the theatre to die. It's the contrast that everyone thinks the kids in the library and the pottery room are the ones in danger while the theatre kids are safe that brings the suspense. The horror of seeing characters run to the theatre for safety is part of the heart-wrenching twist. So when the bomb goes off after everyone has made it out safely, you feel happy but robbed at the same time.
Overall
A refreshing take on how to show a terror attack. The POVs put all the emphasis on the people that matter - not the ones holding guns, the ones fighting to survive and who know what living is because they know what love is. Beautiful and powerful.
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