Five Seven Six Review: White

Book: Five Seven Six
Author: C.E. Wilson
Series: The Boy with Words #2 (final)
Genre: YA paranormal
Source: author (thank you, C.E.!)
Pages: 200
Release: April 28th, 2016

White Frost has only ever known the darkness. Everything outside of her closed society is The Unknown – a strange and dangerous place accessible to only a chosen few. White’s only glimpse of the world beyond comes from her beloved cousin in the form of mysterious collections of words that hint at astonishing wonders. When an accident upends her simple existence, she’s given an unlikely chance to see the truth for herself. What she finds is greater and more terrible than she could have imagined, and before long she is forced to make the most important choice of her life: does she accept her safe, limited world that she’s known or take a desperate gamble in a world not meant for her with the Boy with Words?

Goodreads / Amazon

First off, thank you so much C.E. for providing me with a copy!

This book picks up relatively shortly after the ending to the first book. White has been discovered interacting with Kes, and has been dragged back to her colony, where she is forced to remain docile and pretend to be ignorant about the outside world. But there's no way she can go back to living a life in the darkness, not when she knows the truth about the world...

White transitioned from being curious about the outside world in the first book to trying to find her place in the two worlds she's now apart of. As expected, she met much resistance within the members of her own colony, people who feared the outside world and everything that could possibly have to do with it. But her determination to follow her heart was what made her such a remarkable character to follow, to see her determination to do what she believed was right, and to fight for the enlightenment of everyone else. Though things did go sour more than once, White was still able to pull herself together and find a way out. White's adventure was really one of discovering just where she fit into the world of Creators and the Forgotten Ones.

There's a lot more information on Kes, which I enjoyed. We get to see just how "normal" Kes's life is--he's a college student, lives alone, has a family, enjoys movies, and so forth. What I particularly liked was the introduction of tension between Kes and his family. By bringing in the family element, it really showed some of the sacrifices Kes was making to keep White safe by keeping her hidden.

One of the biggest things about this book was the idea of how to fit into an alien world. For White, she was constantly torn between staying hidden from the "giants," or revealing herself and finding another person to interact with. For Kes, he was torn between keeping White safe, but also needing to find a way for White to live a life, which included leaving her. Both made choices, both fumbled with words, but in the end, both were able to make it work.

I really enjoyed the role haikus and poetry played in this book. I knew whenever a haiku popped up that it would have significant meaning, and they were all so beautifully written. They represented shifts within the characters, indications of their true thoughts and feelings. You could really feel the rawness of emotion within them!

The ending was left a bit open-ended, with a few unanswered questions. Though I didn't mind it for the most part, I still wanted to know who sold White out, and whether Willard ever interacted with Coraopolis, and how the colony of Coraopolis continued to fare. But alas, that's all to be left to the imagination of the reader, which makes the ending intriguing!