Rating: 10/10
Published: 26th May, 2015
Publisher Harpercollins
Genre: Young Adult
Hey guys!!
I've just gotten back from my holiday to Greece. It was so lovely, I've got a sort of tan, but i don't really tan that well I just burn. I read Extraordinary Means in Greece, it took me two days and it was wonderful. I also finished Throne Of Glass by Sarah. J .Maas and I'm still reading Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain.
I'm going to keep this review short and sweet.
I would usually split up the review into things I liked and disliked, but I didn't find anything I disliked about this book.
This book is clever and very well crafted, as the setting is a school/hospital for young people who have been infected with Tuberculoses. The teenagers are cut off from society so they won't infect any one else. It's quite hard to imagine what that would be like for someone to experience being secluded of from our world, but also from your loved ones, your family and friends having to speak to you through a mask or a glass screen.
The world that the five teenagers live in is full of death and abrupt endings, but somehow they still continue to have fun and make the most of what they have been given and work with it. The book is a bittersweet comedy, as most of the jokes the characters say are to do with their illness, again this links in to the fact that they make do with what they're given. If all you're reminded of everyday is that you must eat, sleep and excersise of satisfactory amount, then you're going to make morbid jokes about TB.
This book is very similar to The Perks Of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky and Looking For Alaska by John Green. Where you have a group of misfits friends who make it clear to other people that they want to stand out and be different and that they aren't normal. The characters are also similar as well, this should no way decrease your interest to read this book, it is brilliant, but the English Literature student in me will naturally compare these books due to similarity.
As I said before the five teens are very free and film-like to how they're living their life in Latham (the school/hospital), but I feel that they try and ignore the fact that they're actually ill and dying, so they push it to the back of their minds, but every time one of them coughs and splutters blood into a tissue it is like a relapse back into reality.
'Extraordinary Means is a heavyhearted depiction into our society' - Lydia Halsey
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