Survival by John Achile Yusuf

Survival is an action-adventure story as well as a tale of friendship, loss, courage, and the will to survive.

 

A group of school friends, some of whom are related, have been selected to participate in competitions in South Africa in a number of disciplines. Excited, and ready to represent Nigeria, they are devastated when their flight is not only delayed, but eventually cancelled. Luckily for them, another plane is made available and they are soon headed off, with gold medals in their sights.

 

However, the plane encounters difficulties and comes down on the path between Nigeria and South Africa, right in the Congo jungle area. Those that survived the flight will now have to survive in a place they have never been in before, hoping that they will be rescued soon. However, the signal from the plane is not working, and no one knows where they are…

 

I had high hopes for the story but unfortunately it didn’t quite deliver. Before even looking at the story itself, the book is set up (the copy I received) where POV jumps are not marked, so you’d be in a character’s head in the jungle, and the next thing you’d be in the air traffic tower or with one of the parents and you’d have to stop and reread sections to understand where you are. This happened often. Also, there were sentences that were interrupted by paragraph breaks, so you’d read half the sentence and then the rest of the sentence would be in the next paragraph. That interrupted the flow of reading and took the reader out of the story time and time again. There were a number of grammar and punctuation mistakes that could be touched up, too.

 

The author does try to bring across the sense of despair the survivors feel as well as their triumphs as they find food or defeat and enemy. He touches on the stirrings of first love as well as the anguish of losing a family member. I liked how he followed one character’s inner journey in the progression from “I’m not sure how I am going to survive” to “I’ll do anything to survive”.

 

What caught me with the story, though, was the improbability of the events. Sure, a plane could definitely go down in the jungle and people be forced to survive. But here you have a group of youngsters who have no survivalist gear and seemingly no survivalist knowledge able to spend almost three weeks moving in the jungle and defending themselves from animals ranging from hyenas to hippopotamuses to gorillas. While it’s not impossible, the odds of them meeting and defeating the number of animals they did, as well as the pygmies, seems to be pushing believable boundaries. And I know there had to be some attempt at rescue, but the signal used for communication… was that even possible in that area? Some things you could shrug off being in there for the story, but others I had a hard time believing. It would have been good to describe how they made shelter and a bit more about what they ate (without bringing in spoilers, I was really puzzled at how they brought down an animal that runs at 88 km/h) or even more on the actual survival issues.

 

I liked the idea of the glossary in the book, but I think it would have been better at the front. I wouldn’t have known about it if I hadn’t been told it was there and it would have been frustrating to get to the end and only find it then. If I recall, it also didn’t have every translation in it because there is a section where a lot of food is described that is not in the glossary and I would have loved to know the meanings.

 

This is the author’s debut novel and he most certainly has potential. He just needs to work on fleshing out certain areas and opportunities in future books as well as remembering that “show, don’t tell” is key!

 

Thank you to Fearless Storyteller House Emporium and the author for the opportunity to review the book.

It Starts with a Fish by Emily Kemme

 It Starts with a Fish is a collection of blog posts detailing events or even non-events in the author’s life. It’s a random amalgamation of experiences running from 2015 to 2020 and covers family, pets, friends, and everyday occurrences.

 

While I thank the author for the clean script grammar- and punctuation-wise, I must confess I did not finish the book. It’s very rare that I don’t finish one, especially one to review. However, about forty pages before the end, I had to give up.

 

This is not a reflection on the posts themselves, it was the amalgamation into one book that did it for me. As blog posts, these work very well as they are a glimpse into the author’s life and can be read and savoured as posted. Altogether, however, they felt like too much information all at once. I was hoping for more humour or life lessons, and maybe if these were read weekly or monthly, the “telling” of experiences would work for the reader. But this felt more like a diary. If I knew the author, this might have been different, but I guess I didn’t feel the personal connection and the posts didn’t resonate with me. Another reason the book didn’t feel right was that info was repeated. For example, if the stories were read when posted, the author may have to remind the reader of family names or other info just to bring them back to where the previous post left off. Here, reading the posts one after the other, you’d have the reader reminded each time of a family name or the fact that a certain person played this role in the family.

 

I commend the author on putting so much of herself out there for the world to see, but the format was not enough for me to hold my interest.

 

Thanks to NetGalley and Loudhailer Books for the opportunity to review the book.