Numbers
Numbers by Rachel Ward
Published February 2010 by Chicken House/Scholastic Inc. Review copy provided by publisher.
What if you knew the day that someone, everyone would die? Could you live with that secret?
Jem lives with the burden of knowing everyone’s numbers. She’s known about the numbers since she was a little girl. In her stroller, she used to tell her mom everyone the numbers but it’s not until her mother dies that she knows exactly what the numbers mean. When she looks someone in the eye, she sees the numbers in her head.
Knowing people’s numbers, Jem avoids friendships and relationships until she meets Spider. Spider is an outsider just like Jem.
When Jem and Spider are out and about one day in London, Jem sees a chilling chain of events in people’s eyes. She and Spider must deal with the aftereffects of what Jem saw.
This book has had me thinking a lot about whether or not I would want to know my family and friends’ numbers. I honestly don’t think I would want to know.
The first half of the book is action-packed and full of drama, I couldn’t put this book down. About 2/3 of the way through a few things getting a bit strange and don’t seem to fit the tone of the rest of the book. I think that fans of realistic-supernatural books will enjoy Numbers. Ward is supposedly at work on the sequel, Numbers 02: The Chaos.
