Never World Wake

Bee hasn’t spoken to her best friends since her boyfriend’s mysterious death. Now, a year later, she needs to face them. They’re beautiful, rich and deadly. She is certain one of them holds the truth about what really happened to Jim.

A whirlwind night leads to a narrowly missed car collision and a sinister man knocking at the door as a storm rages outside, to deliver a world-shattering message.

As secrets unravel and time backbends, the five friends must make a shocking choice.

So that was three weeks. I apologise.

I am in kind of a weird place with reading right now. I was in a fairly sustained slump (had to give up reading The Idiot but I will get back to it at some point. Does anything ever actually happen? I was around 150 pages in and as yet nothing had) which lifted briefly while I was away so I could read The Closed Casket (a new Hercule Poirot novel by my love, Sophie Hannah) and the book I’m reviewing  today, Never World Wake by Marisha Pessl (Belletrist pick. Amazing, as always), but then I moved into The Accidental by Ali Smith and the slump has descended once again. I think I have the summer blues (that’s a thing, right?). If you have any cheering reading suggestions please throw them my way. I would like to get out of this slump for good.

Anyway. Never World Wake. This book came as a total surprise to me in all of the best ways. It’s the first YA book Belletrist has picked, and it is a stunner. We have ALL of my favourite ingredients: rich boarding school kids (with the obligatory outsider scholarship kid obviously), mysterious death, unreliable characters (all these fuckers do is lie) and magic.

Don’t judge it by its pretty cover. This book is one intense ride.

So we have a bunch of recently reunited rich teens – the aforementioned hedonistic rich kids and Bee, the scholarship student and the “good girl”, torn apart by the mysterious death of one of their group (Bee’s boyfriend), Jim a year prior. They come together for one final night of partying before they all depart for college, and on the way home driving in a collective drunk stupor they almost have a head on collision with a truck.

This is when shit really hits the fan.

They return home to their mansion, only to be visited by a strange elderly man (The Keeper, as we will come to know) who tells them that actually, that collision wasn’t a near miss. It was a direct hit. The five of them aren’t so much home and clear as, in actual fact, lying dead in that car, trapped in something called a Never World Wake. The way to escape? Only one of them can. The group have to unanimously vote on which of their number lives to see tomorrow. The rest of them die forever. In the mean time they are doomed to repeat the same day until they can reach a consensus on which of them will survive.

From this explosive beginning, Pessl takes the narrative in so many winding and shocking directions, with the storyline of the Wake and the mystery of Jim’s tragic death running concurrently, meeting and diverging during the absolute roller coaster ride that is reading this novel. Watching how each of the characters deals with the Wake – from trying desperately to reach a consensus and escape to losing themselves in the distractions that you can find in a consequence-less world that resets every 23 hours – is a fascinating insight into the worst of human psyche in a claustrophobic nightmare about survival at all costs or total self-destruction – depending on who you are.

Nothing in this novel is what it initially appears – what you remember as the grand love story of your life might actually turn out to have been a house of horrors, precious objects become rusted, broken and dangerous on closer inspection and the person you always felt was the strongest and the coolest under pressure? They will be the first one to break.

Pessl’s writing is rich, sensual, poetic and infused with a brutal darkness that really appealed to me. If you enjoyed We Were Liars by E. Lockhart or The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma it’s a pretty safe bet you’ll be into Never World Wake. It’s a truly gripping read.

“We swear we see each other, but all we are ever able to make out is a tiny porthole view of an ocean. We think we remember the past as it was, but our memories are as fantastic and flimsy as dreams.”