This is an appropriately tense book.
It's about a kid whose family moves around a lot, because they're in witness protection after the dad informed on a crime. Except that this informing happened when the kid was like five, so the details of it are muddled by "the Lizard Man" (le badguy who has a prominent lizard tattoo, hence the name) and "the Protectors" (the people organizing the witness protection).
Also the dad is rather paranoid, and everyone (except the annoying five-year-old sister) is stressed by it. Plus the kid is thirteen for most of the book, and getting increasingly frustrated and rebellious about the dad's paranoid rules. Granted, [ENDING SPOILERS] |the rules legitimately are for his protection, because the Lizard Man is actually after him, not the dad. But he doesn't know that until shortly before the end|.
Partway through the book, the protagonist starts to wonder whether or not the Lizard Man actually exists, and if his dad is just making the whole thing up or having paranoid delusions. And because he's questioning it, readers (i.e. me) start to wonder if he's actually right and there's no such thing as the Lizard Man. |As it turns out, there is such a thing as the Lizard Man.|
According to the author note / postlude / acknowledgements, the depiction of the witness protection service in this book is actually fairly unrealistic (as in, the real one works a lot better and is also run by the U.S. Marshals instead of spooky FBI-ish people).
Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A soft T for scariness and being tense.
4 stars.
(Endnote: I've been thinking about making a separate type of spoiler tags for the big major spoilers, and coloring them red or something. Like |spoiler| versus |major spoiler|. The problem is that I don't think anyone will remember why some spoiler tags are red, and also it might look silly.)
No comments:
Post a Comment