ACRBA Blog Tour: Activate by Adele Jones

3 - 7 April 2017

Australian Christian Readers Blog Alliance

is Introducing 

Activate

(By the Rhiza Press, 1 November 2016)

By Adele Jones

About the Book:

Josh Hammond’s not who he says he is. To stay alive, he must guard his identity, existing isolated from his former life and those he loves. The one enemy he can’t outrun is his failing health, and time is short. Desperate for a solution, Josh leaves the protection of his safe house unapproved. Instead of a cure, he’s left powerless against a cunning adversary. Determined to reclaim his life, he grasps an opportunity for escape, but things go drastically wrong. Can he find a way to expose the lies of a criminal mastermind, or will he be silenced? Forever.

About the Author:

Adele Jones lives in Queensland, Australia. Her writing is inspired by a passion for family, faith, friends, music and science – and her broad ranging imagination.

A strong believer in embracing life's journey, Adele delights in sharing that adventure with others, be that through the pages of a story or engaging in a social or professional context. Through her broad personal and professional interests, she has welcomed diverse engagement opportunities, including science based student experience sessions, conference presentations, literary readings and musical exploits.

With a long standing interest in historical fiction, Adele based her Master's dissertation on this topic and is currently anticipating release of her first novel in this genre, A Devil's Ransom (www.roseandcrownbooks.com). She has also had a variety of poems, short stories, inspirational meditations, devotions and magazine articles published. Her first YA novel Integrate was awarded the 2013 Caleb Prize for unpublished manuscript, and is due to for release in September 2014. Replicate is the second book in this series and was released in October 2015.   

More information:
Adele Jones: www.adelejonesauthor.com

You can read my review for Activate here: Activate by Adele Jones

Review: Activate by Adele Jones

Excellent End to Series

This is the third and final novel in Adele Jones’s trilogy about mitochondrial disease patient Blaine Colton, and I don’t recommend you read this without reading the other two books first: Replicate and Integrate.

Activate has the same fault as the final book in many other Young Adult series: you’re desperate to read it to find out what happens to characters you’ve come to know and love (or not!) through the previous books, but at the same time you don’t want it to end because that means saying goodbye to those same characters.

And while you’d like to believe it’s going to have a happy ending, the previous novel killed off a major character, which means you’re not entirely sure if Blaine is going to get his happy ending … after all, he has an incurable degenerative disease. Odds are, this isn’t going to end well.

I’m not going to say too much about the plot. Suffice to say it met expectations (which were high, given how much I enjoyed the earlier novels). Yes, there is a lot of science stuff. No, I didn’t understand it all, but that didn’t matter. Yes, there is plenty of suspense—not just in the main plot, but in the underlying race against time to find a cure for Blaine.

Overall, Activate and the other books in this series are fast-paced Young Adult thrillers with a male protagonist—so great options for any teenage boys you know who love reading but don’t want novels with any of that silly romance stuff (although Blaine does have a romantic relationship, it’s not the focus of the plot). The series is also unique in that it’s set in modern-day Brisbane, Australia, not some dystopian future version of the USA, and it reflects a Christian world view.

Thanks to Rhiza Press and NetGalley for providing a free ebook for review. Click here to find out more about Adele Jones at her website, and you can read the introduction to Activate below: