Show Stopper
Hayley Barker
Ben lives a Pure life guarded by security and filled with food and comfort. He never wants for anything – except to be allowed to see the Circus. Hoshiko is the tightrope walker of the circus – a Dreg not worthy of food and just waiting to be killed. When Ben saves Hoshiko from death they find themselves walking the tightrope together – can they both make it out from the deadly circus alive?
The blurb on this one is actually inaccurate. The Dregs living in poverty do not get the opportunity to sell their children – their children are just ripped away from them if they are ‘selected’. What I would have liked to see more of was the slums and how bad they actually are. Or, just Pure life and what it looks like normally. To me, this is just another dystopian future society with problems, there isn’t anything particularly neat about it. I found it hard to believe in the insta-love between Ben and Hoshiko. I also find it difficult to believe in the things that the 6 year old Greta can accomplish by herself. I get that she is really grownup from her terrible circumstances, but realistically she wouldn’t be able to grasp all of those concepts.
This is the age old theme of us vs them. We get the perspectives of both the Cat and Ben, the Dreg and the Pure. This will remind some readers of Red Queen or Tarnished City and similar novels. What this novel brings to the table is just simple horribleness without magic as an excuse. The author says that she was inspired by the opinions of the English against immigrants, and I have to say it’s one of the few issues that makes me really upset. Asylum seekers didn’t risk their lives on a rickety boat because life back home was good!
I warmed up to the characters and settled in, and I was mainly satisfied by the ending. I am not going to avidly hunt down the next novel in this duology though because I just didn’t feel strongly enough about anything. I’d rather reread Disruption. I put off reading Show Stopper for more than a !year! because it looked ok, but not fascinating. The blurb didn’t grab me. I’m giving this novel 3 stars.
Scholastic | 1st October 2017 | AU$16.99 | paperback
Anne’s an interesting alternative heroine mainly because her story has already been determined by history. It takes any anticipation out of the story and leaves us with Anne and her strong personality. For the time, the way she is written is as a superstitious but practical woman who is determined to live her life her way. Of course we can’t know what she was like in real life, but we’d like to hope that she wasn’t a completely passive observer of her life – and that she was lucky enough to get a bit of romance apart from her arranged marriages.
At the very beginning of this novel I was bewildered by the number of characters that I was going to have to keep track of. I thought of drawing a mind-map in fact! Slowly though I kept track of the three main women and their important connections – Sophie, Claire and Bec. I generally enjoyed the past interspersed with the present, and found that although the past parts could have been excluded, they added a depth to the current day fears of the women (and men).
Do I actually see this ‘cruel and bloody fist’ of Lord Endrick? Nope, I do not. All I see is simple Kestra getting simple revenge on her captors, and them having revenge on her. While there was potential for intrigue, instead I felt like Kestra was holding all the cards and the reader didn’t know enough to actually imagine what was happening behind the scenes. In fact, I felt that Kestra was particularly slow in working out what was going on (even with really clear clues).
Shalia is a decent enough character who is determined to stand on her own two feet. However, sometimes this just doesn’t work for her. I felt confused that sometimes she stood up for herself against Calix, but the rest of the time she didn’t. Do you have the power or not Shalia? She seems to have faith in the power of marriage even as she subverts it. I didn’t understand her well enough to get what she really meant.
Ugh, take me back to the older style Elemental Master’s series! I don’t care that they were ‘just’ re-imagined fairy-tales. Yes yes, it’s important that the psychics and the clairvoyants (and Celtic Warriors) get airtime (readtime?) but give me some air elementals any day. None of the other Elemental Masters get more than one novel devoted to them, so why should Nan and Sarah (3 books and counting)?
The thing for me about this novel was the pacing. It was just so incredibly slow! I figured that the three perspective would end up together eventually, but that ‘eventually’ wasn’t until the end of the novel (trust me, I haven’t spoiled it for you). The multiple perspectives worked against the suspense in this novel. Despite the blurb being very keen to state that there is a price on Hatu’s head, and the Hidden ones ulterior motives, I didn’t feel a sense of danger.
This is a lighthearted romance with a spot of dog-loving thrown in! Cora’s a likable enough character who creates laughter with her descriptions of dogs-gone-wrong. There are sad parts to the novel too, but nothing particularly cry worthy. If you’re looking for a beach-side read, this novel could be it. This novel is decidedly chaste, so don’t go looking for sex scenes.