Review: Jack Croxall's Excellent Dystopian Thriller Wye

There are certain things you just shouldn't do. During a quiet moment at work, you shouldn't open up a book on the Kindle app on your iPhone and begin reading it and if you do, you most certainly shouldn't get hopelessly addicted to said book, to the extent that you simply cannot put it down. If you're going to do all that, might I suggest that there is no better book than Jack Croxall's standalone dystopian thriller Wye.

Wye is a young girl, sixteen-years-old to be precise and she is making her way across the Wasteland of what is now Dead England. Pursued by zombies, Wye and her band of fellow survivors are making their way to the east, to a cabin that may or may not exist on the coast of England. Realising that they are perhaps the last people left alive on earth, Wye keeps a diary to document their journey as well as The Sickness and The Spread of the disease.

If you think this sounds remotely familiar to anything you've read before, think again. Author Jack Croxall leads you down an overgrown path in the English countryside and then twists the story again and again... and again. Everything you thought you knew about zombie thrillers is here with allusions to Warm Bodies, The Walking Dead and everything inbetween but nothing, nothing is as it seems.

I loved Jack Croxall's style of writing with a fervour I usually reserve for Lauren Oliver. And like Lauren Oliver, Jack has written a novel where nothing else matters in life except the moments where you are reading this story. Work? It'll take second place, as will any study or family commitments you might have. Valentine's Day? Fine, but only if there is a long afternoon reading session scheduled in there among all the chocolates, flowers and fancy dinners.

There were entire paragraphs which I wanted to highlight, save or tweet but alas, I was too busy reading to stop for any length of time. Suffice to say, I loved Jack's lyrical style of writing and the voice that he gave to Wye.

As a narrator, Wye is wonderfully flawed. You soon become aware that you can't trust a word she says and that is okay. More than okay, in fact, Wye is the perfect narrator to give a human touch to a most unusual catastrophe.

It might only be February but I'm already claiming Wye to be my book of the year for 2016. It is so good that I considered downgrading all my previous star-ratings in order to adequately reflect the act of giving this book five stars.

I give Wye by Jack Croxall a superb five out of five stars and would highly recommend it to any reader who is in the mood for a book that really moves them.