The Yellowcake Conspiracy
The Yellowcake Conspiracy is a book that has the right consistency to keep teens gripped to the fast paced, action packed adventure whilst still keeping the mystical and quirkiness quality of the novel. However, the fast paced storyline may be there to accompany the spy genre, but it can be quite tedious and mainly confusing to follow. I only recommend this novel for people who are able to follow the puzzling jigsaw layout.
In the book, there were some very tense and dramatic moments, which I felt the author could have expanded on because there was no description. This made these moments disappointing as they were soon over in a couple of sentences. But I thought that this could have been because the protagonist (Haroun) felt no emotion and therefore the novel had no description.
The undescriptive storyline adds to the spy genre of the book and it makes most of it quite mystical. However, these scattered mystical events forces readers to have to try and piece the storyline together themselves, like a jigsaw. This was the thing that made it most confusing for me.
Davies has decided to use African and French language extracts in his book. Although he would always translate afterwards or in the glossary, I always lost my place and focus form having to constantly look at the glossary It may seem that he is paying respect to the African culture, by using it as the setting, but it eventually became irritating. I also found the e-mail sections irritating too, because they always popped up randomly in the middle of two chapters and they had no relation to what was going on in the story. At first, they caught my eye as they were different to anything that I have seen in a novel before, but by the ending they just became annoying and slightly tacky.
Overall, I don't approve of this book because of the puzzling story line and the lack of description. It depends on what sort of genre you like and age group you are, but I personally didn't enjoy the book and I wouldn't want to read it again.
