Share this
Twitter
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Yahoo
Googlize this
Facebook
Export PDF
Print
E-mail
What would you do if you knew the exact date and time of your death? What would do as you approached your last few minutes of being alive?
A morbid question, right? A premonition of death is something that scares most people, myself included. They say one shouldn’t be afraid of death since everyone will eventually leave this earth, but that's tough advice to take when you feel like you still have so much unfinished businesses in this life, and when you think of all the people you will be leaving behind. I once tried to imagine that it was my last day alive, and while theoretically that should help you “seize the day”, I just ended up becoming depressed. What’s terrifying about death is that we are absolutely powerless against it: it comes, and when it does, we can’t stop it.
But what if you had advance warning--but for someone else? Let’s push it further: what if you could see and feel if a person was nearing his or her death, but you couldn’t warn them about it? What if all you could do was scream?
Kaylee Cavanaugh deals with this dilemma in Rachel Vincent’s Soul Screamers series. Kaylee is a normal teenager with average grades, a girl who enjoys partying and sneaking into clubs with her best friend Emma. She lives with her uncle, aunt, and her popular cousin, Sophie, who denies her existence in school. Kaylee is nobody special, really…not until she gets her panic attacks. She doesn’t know why or when or how it happened, but Kaylee know when someone is about to die. She doesn’t see dead people, but she can sense when someone is dying. And when she does, something inside her compels her to scream her lungs out, loud enough to shatter glass--as if knowing someone was about to die wasn’t bad enough, right?
We first meet Kaylee in My Soul to Take, as she and her best friend Emma are about to sneak in to Taboo, an 18-and-up only club where Emma’s sister works. Kaylee thought it would be an especially good night when she catches the eye of the hottest guy in school, Nash Hudson. However, things go bad quickly when she starts to feel the edges of the all-too-familiar panic attack after looking at one of the girls in the club. Kaylee makes her way out of the club, but Nash follows, and surprises her by helping her calm down. Nash seemed to have his own secrets, too – secrets that seem to involve her. Kaylee has other things to think about, though, when girls start dying around her, including the one she saw in the club that night. Only she knows who will die next, but what can she do to help them when all she can do is scream?
Despite all the death that surrounds Kaylee, everything else in the story is very much alive. Kaylee is a very strong protagonist (even reviewers who don't agree with me about the rest of the cast--All Things Urban Fantasy thinks “[t]he other teenagers in this book are fairly stereotypical”--find Kaylee and Nash to be good leads), so real that I can almost hear her voice when I read the book. Kaylee may first come across as your typical jaded protagonist--complete with family issues and a single, popular friend--but there is more to her than what first meets the eye. Kaylee doesn’t let her panic attacks define her and instead tries to live a normal life in spite of them. She’s also not one to make her world revolve around a guy, and totally ignore her family. She’s compassionate, someone who wouldn’t leave a friend--or anyone who needs help--hanging if she can help it. Her tendency to over think things can get a bit annoying at times, but I also believe that’s what gives her a human touch. The supporting characters did not disappoint either, and I’m very glad to see that Kaylee’s love interest has a life of his own, rather than just being fixated on Kaylee. Kaylee and Nash are a good couple (at least on paper), and their chemistry feels real, never exaggerated, maybe because there are no flowery words used when Kaylee describes Nash… well, okay, there was some repetition regarding the planes on his back and the muscles of his arms look like, but it never went overboard. Emma, the best friend, is also a very refreshing character. The “Best Friend” characters in YA fantasy tend to be airheads who are placed there just so the protagonist has a close confidant. Emma isn’t a throwaway character, thankfully, and it’s nice to see a best friend who actually thinks for herself and, again like real people, has a life that involves more than just being the best friend of the protagonist. The characters in My Soul to Take are far from perfect, but they balance out each other quite nicely.
Stories involving death and/or premonitions aren’t a novelty in the YA fantasy genre. Other than normal people falling in love with a supernatural creature (vampire, angels, werewolves, pixies, fairies – take your pick) and zombie apocalypses, characters with a knack for predicting death or communing with ghosts are slowly gaining popularity. Rachel Vincent makes use of this idea quite nicely in Soul Screamers, taking a cue from Irish mythology and adding her own twist to it to make it work for the story. She has weaved a world where souls are like money, and grim reapers use computers to work, and people actually barter souls to get fame, money, everlasting youth or all of the above. It’s a take on death and the afterlife unlike any you’ve seen on TV or movies, and Vincent did not need any flashy effects to make it seem believable. This isn’t a boy-meets-girl-and-one-of-them-has-superpowers novel – there’s just the right amount of romance, horror and fantasy to satisfy those with a thirst for those genres, all wrapped up in an interesting, believable setting. (Some readers loved the mythology: Ink and Paper calls it “unique”, and I won’t go on further because that would spoil the book for you.)
My Soul to Take is the first book of the Soul Screamers series, and is followed with two more books, My Soul to Save and My Soul to Keep. There is a free novella that can be downloaded from the Soul Screamers site, My Soul to Lose, which introduces us to Kaylee’s world and her short stint in the psychiatric ward. Soul Screamers is a promising series (even parents would agree it seems, as Common Sense Media sees Kaylee as “a strong character who is willing to do what she can to save those she loves”), and I can’t wait to read the next book.
[Image source: rachelvincent.com. Copyright holder/s maintain appropriate rights.]
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
