Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Cycler by Lauren McLaughlin

The book "Cycler" is about a teenage girl named Jill. At the end of each month for a period of four days Jill morphs into a boy named Jack. His body replaces hers, and yet at the end of the period of four days her body transforms back to normal. Doctors have no cure or explanation for the oddities of Jill's body. Despite all of these complications Jill tries her hardest to lead a normal teenage life, whatever that may be. Jill is trying to juggle the perfect plan to win herself a prom date, a best friend that's fashion-crazy, and in all effort to stay normal Jill tries to hide Jack's existence from the world. Although soon she finds that Jack is crossing not only into her life physically for those four days, but now his desires and thoughts are streaming into her regular life. Jill finds her perfectly planned life to have flaws she never saw coming, and she holds a truth that could make or break her future. The question is, with another person ruling her body can she try to suffocate the truth before it materializes?

The whole concept of Cycler intrigued me from the very beginning. I feel like the concept is one that will draw many wandering eyes into the book. The highlight for me had to be seeing all of the realistic relationships forming and breaking, all around the surreal idea that one body can be shared by two people. That being said, I feel like there were two disconnects in this book one being that it always revolved around sex or sexual intentions. Teenagers read books with sex in the them all the time, however this book had a sexual reference on every page if not taking up the page. The second downside to this book for me was that I didn't fully understand the transformations between Jack and Jill until close to the very end. Almost the whole book I'd misled myself to believing that the transformations were taking place in two separate bodies; when close to the end of the book the details made themselves more apparent, all the same the book hadn't corrected my wrong thinking until later on. Overall, the book had a great idea propelling it and I'd be interested in checking out the sequel to see what happens to a few of the loose ends I've been pondering over.

Reviewer Age:14
Reviewer City, State and Country: Libertyville, IL US