Meredith Badger

""He is the floor beneath our feet and the roof above our heads. He is the walls around us. He is the window through which we seen into ourselves and the door that leads to a better understanding. He is always watching, protecting us. We follow him so we in turn can be followed..."

What a twisted little tale. It's two parts - part kidnapping story and part survival story. Esther, Harry, Felicity and Lucille are 4 reincarnated souls - The Special Ones. They only use the body as a vessel and show more pass around from body to body. So the other 3 need to collect the new vessels.

All at the command of the he.
Those in the house only know of him as that - he says what they do, he watches them every day so they stay in their personalities, their "roles" because.....they are not really reincarnated souls. They are poor teenagers and kids, kidnapped and forced to take on these rolls - fed these lies to feel special. They are forced to live in a wooden house and live off the land. They are videoed night and day and their videos are released to their "followers." They also talk with their followers every night. It's a sick game and disturbing to read and realize all the things he is making them do - and the terror that they live in.

Right around Chapter 16, this book completely changes. And I loved it! show less

Review originally posted here: http://tsanasreads.tumblr.com/post/21168680181/shift-by-em-bailey

Shift is full of psychological drama and there is blurring of reality so you’re not always sure what’s real and what isn’t. It’s also a book about mental illness about being weird and about dealing (or not) with those things.

I really loved it.

Honestly, there was only one aspect I disliked about it and it’s not the sort of thing that would bother everyone. The author is Australian (this show more is her first YA book, but she has written books for younger readers as Meredith Badger) and the book is indisputably set in an Australian coastal town near either Melbourne or Sydney (my theory is Melbourne, but I may be biased). It’s definitely Australia because they have high schools like we do (years 7 to 12) and wear school uniforms in state schools (I only recently learnt this is a bit of an Australian quirk) and, well it all sounded Australian. But. It also felt like the most direct mentions of Australianness had been removed or carefully not mentioned. At one point the main character goes for a run through the forest, not the bush. There’s a scene near a fig tree, which in itself isn’t that strange, but no gum trees were ever mentioned even thought they must have been ever-present. It just bothered me a bit. A setting made slightly generic but not completely. I would have enjoyed seeing more Australia in it.

Mind you, that was a very small component. The rest of the book — the characters, the plot — was top notch. Olive was great. She was a flawed narrator but that was part of the charm. We were so deeply inside her head that we could only guess things she didn’t know herself a little while before they happened. The way some events were foreshadowed, you had to be paying more attention than Olive was to notice.

The other characters were also very believable. Creepy Miranda was particularly well drawn and mysterious to just the right extent. The secondary characters of best friend, ex-best friend and love interest were also well crafted. I’m not sure that I can properly say what I liked about them without spoilers, however.

And the ending was great. A perfect mix of suspense, action and, well, spoilers.

Even though it’s not really fantasy or science fiction, I think this is still the kind of book lovers of SFF YA would enjoy. And lovers of mainstream YA too, particularly of the darker variety. I loved it. One of my top books read this year. (Oh, and isn’t the cover great? It’s particularly apt, too.)

5 / 5 stars show less

Miranda Vaile is the strong point of this young adult novel. It is well worth reading for her alone. Miranda is offered to us, on the one hand, as a supernatural demon and on the other as a rolled-gold bitch who is disturbed and rageful, but also charming to the nth degree. For good measure, she can also be seen as the symbol of a destructive inner voice, enticing one unlucky girl into anorexia. Whatever she is exactly, Miranda has the psychopaths’s ability to pinpoint and play to our show more longings, fears and frailties, without a particle of real empathy.

The narrator is fellow high school student Olive Corbett, who has plenty of her own issues to work through. Family stuff. Huge amounts of confusion, guilt and anger have knocked her off course. In the early part of the novel she is trying to sort herself out while also observing Miranda from a distance.

Olive has ample evidence that Miranda is vicious and destructive, and decides, reasonably enough, to avoid her. That’s all thrown out the window, though, when Miranda turns her attentions to Olive. Miranda is fun, cutting through social barriers to get her and her underage friends-of-the-moment into nightclubs and posh fashion shoots. The devil indeed wears Prada. Miranda inspires obsessive adoration, which is also seductive, even while separating you from the humble everyday world.

It’s a life lesson: a scary person who suddenly turns sweet, and even flatters you, is almost irresistably seductive, a dream come true. Reason and rationality won't defeat them.

The rival that a demon cannot defeat, though, is the genuine lover – someone who knows you well enough to offer respect, tenderness and passion.

Who or what is Miranda really? In a way, this is a secondary issue. Herman Melville didn’t need the fantasy genre to show us Moby Dick as the ‘gliding great demon of the deep’. He just had to float the idea.

The double is used as a literary device throughout, to explore personal identity.

Males generally appear in a positive light – the young ones anyway – but in the romance tradition they are pretty much wooden props, even when they say and do the right thing. show less

WOW. It’s easy to see why this won the Gold Inky on Inside a Dog this year. Em Bailey has written a taut, incisive and entertaining suspense novel here. The book has a killer opening paragraph:
“There were two things everyone knew about Miranda Vale before she’d even started at our school. The first was that she had no parents – they were dead. And the second? They were dead because Miranda had killed them.”
This serves to instantly draw us in and stir our curiosity. Who is Miranda? show more Did she really kill her parents? Is she dangerous? Whilst the rest of the school wonders why someone “like that” would be coming to their school, Olive, our protagonist, and her friend, Ami, can’t wait to meet her.
From the beginning of this story, we know Olive is “different” to other people at her school. We discover her life is one of routines, medication and visiting Dr Richter, hinting that there may be some mental health issues and making us consider she may not be a reliable narrator. But, she has a firm friend in Ami and we realise that theirs is a very close friendship. It is established that there was an “incident” and that Ami has also been through something similar. They seem to understand each other implicitly - it is clear that this relationship is an anchor in Olive’s life and it is fun to read, too.
Olive’s family has its issues too – Dad is absent, and her Mum, a skittish online vitamin salesperson, barely seems to cope at times. Her adoring younger brother, Toby, has recurring nightmares that Olive blames herself for. Olive also states she is the reason her Dad left. Like I said – issues.
Miranda arrives and more or less blends into the background. Until she starts to trail after Katie, a former friend of Olive’s, who is part of the popular crowd. This instantly brings up more questions about Olive, who is very clearly no longer part of that group. Through a series of seemingly unconnected events, Miranda and Katie are suddenly best friends - inseparable. Ami and Olive notice things about Miranda that seem weird – her mirror eyes, her strange skin. There is a mystery to be solved here. Events begin to spiral out of control as Katie becomes thin and wan, and Miranda thrives in direct counterpoint. Olive and Ami suspect that Miranda is a shapeshifter, sucking the life out of Katie, but who can they tell? Who would believe such a thing?
I am determined not to put any spoilers in here, but this story just gets more intense, the further you go. Once I was three-quarters of the way in, I HAD to finish it.
This is the beauty of Bailey’s writing – she begins to peel back what we see, layer by layer, until we understand we are looking at the truth. The truth is sometimes not want we want to hear, nor what we expect, but the truth, in the end, is what will save you and this is proven in the satisfying conclusion to this excellent first YA novel. I look forward to the next offering from Em Bailey, but I am a little scared about where it will take us! show less