BZRK

"BZRK," Michael Grant, is about a war that's bigger than us . . . but really much, much smaller.
         Noah's brother used to be an army hero.  Now he's locked up in the insane aslyumn, screaming "Berserk, berserk, nano, nano," over and over again.  Sadie's father was the richest man in the world.  Now her father and brother are died in a car-crash and the aneurysm in her head is threatening to kill her.  Both Noah and Sadie are sought out and initiated into a secret society where they take the name of crazy people because they know that that will be their fate.  Thrust into a world that's alien but very close to home, Noah and Sadie must keep their wits about them if they're to make it out of the meat.

Great sci-fi action book, I swear. Also, a great book if you want to learn about the human body . . . but, in many ways, it's quite disgusting.  Especially when the start describing eyeballs . . . Urgh, that gives me phantoms just thinking about it.
        This book, as my language arts teacher puts it has "language issues."  And it does.  Lots of them.  So, now you've been doubly warned.  Please do not sue me if you get a shock while reading this book.  Because, see, I'll warn you thrice, these people in this book have language issues, worse than a driver from New Jersey.
       But, that aside, I would like to focus on in the characters.  You do not get a lot of time to learn about each character, really, you don't get a chapter on each of them full of back detail--not even the main characters.  There are a bunch of little details scattered in that gives you an idea of who they are and what their "normal" lives are, but you don't get a lot of preamble before the planes start blowing up and the bugs start crawling.  Which is just the way I like it.
       I also sort of enjoy the fact that you do not intimately know each character as well as you should, because it puts you in the place of the other characters.  No one knows much about each other in this book, they don't even know their real names (read:  Keats, Plath, Wilkes, Vincent, Ophelia, Lear . . .), so it adds to the level of reality that you know next to nothing.  Also, it makes it seem like none of the characters know anything about themselves, which adds another layer to things.
      Personally, my favorite character is Wilkes.  She is so wicked . . . I've already stated that I like the bad-girl type, haven't I?  And there couldn't have been a better antagonist, because Bug-Man is so arrogant it makes my skin crawl . . . And that's what makes him awesome.
      Now, onto the nanos.  They are an amazing piece of science-fiction, which may or may not be fiction for much longer.  As I once read somewhere, the scariest thing is something that could happen.  I heard them talking on the radio about nanotechnology, and I completely freezed up.  It won't be long now before people will be fighting on our optic nerves, wiring our brains, and controlling our actions, if they aren't doing it already.  I couldn't quite get a picture in my head of what nanos looked like, though.  They said they looked like praying mantises, but in my mind they looked more like 'nanobugs,' little toys that my brother has.  It's also fun to think about the scale of things.  For mascara to be a serious obstacle for nanos, how small must they be?  Would you be able to crush one if you found them?
   This book would definitely be in my top ten science-fictions books.  Of course, there are several things that could've made this story better, several elements, like maybe going longer and telling us what was going to happen next . . . But I mustn't start being greedy, right?  This book came out this year, so it's new.  We cannot be expecting a sequel any time soon, which is a pity.
      We'll just have to sit here and wait, I suppose, twiddle our thumbs for a bit, maybe read another book or two, and pray that Plath and Keats aren't sitting in the cafe across the street, crawling through our meat.

www.gobzrk.com is a cool website.  It is not lame, like many other websites for many other books (which shall remain unnamed).  You can register, play some sort of game (I haven't tried it yet), and take a quiz on famous insane people of the past!  Yey!