Farrar, Straus and Giroux BYR
May 8, 2012
373 pages
add to Goodreads/buy on Book Depo/or Amazon
The beautiful, burning pain of each strike has left her addicted, drawn to lightning and the next time it decides to shoot down from the sky and hit her.
After an incident that forced Mia and her family to leave their hometown in Arizona, however, they've moved to Los Angeles - the city where it supposedly never rains. Several weeks ago there was a giant earthquake, part of a series of natural and other disasters across the world, that all but leveled the city of Los Angeles and the surrounding area. In this post-apocalyptic time, Mia is struggling to maintain order in her life and that of her younger brother, Parker - all while helping her mother through her shock and depression.
As school starts back, Mia is forced to leave her mother home all day - watching Prophet's The Hour of Light Prophet, a self proclaimed prophet of God (who hears the voice of God) predicted the quake and has gained more and more Followers since.
Between Mia's ability to absorb lightning strikes and not die, Prophet and whatever he and his Followers have planned - or claim to know about, as well as the new people she encounters at school, Mia has her work cut out for her just surviving. And, perhaps, making sure everyone else does, too.
Whether it was because I didn't read the synopsis fully or something else, Struck was not at all what I expected (and by now I've completely forgotten what ever it was I did expect). I love that it has so many elements - Mia and the lightning, it's post-apocalyptic, the fanatical Prophet and his Followers evangelizing all over town, the religious end of the world element (through Prophet), some good vs evil, and of let's not forget, some romance - yet they all work together.
Mia and Jeremy are definitely the strongest characters in Struck. The other - Parker, Katrina, Mia's mother, etc - aren't quite as strong and in a few scenes I did wish for a little more from them, but I love that we're given so much description for them. It's easy to picture the characters of Struck, Jennifer Bosworth does an excellent job describing not not only their physical attributes but also the feelings they give off to other characters - it makes them easy to picture right away.
The relationship between Mia and Jeremy will leave you not only pulling for them, but also hoping everyone makes it out of it in one piece.
The description of Los Angeles is also nice. We don't get all of it right away. As things are told by Mia, readers learn about different things and places as she either goes to those places or hears about them. It's still a fantastic job of building the world of Los Angeles after it's been quite nearly destroyed by a giant earthquake.
Plot twists in Struck never failed to grab me - especially towards the end. Things really came together beautifully then (including just what Mia's lightning attraction really was and what it meant as I was somehow not quite grasping all of it earlier).
Rating: 8/10
Thank you to the publisher & NetGalley for my egalley
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