The Marbury Lens

The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I debated between three and four stars for this one. I loved the idea, and I always do love the idea of hell-worlds. It had a very Silent Hill-esque feeling, where it was a punishment for something done in this world, or a punishment self-imposed on the main character because of the trauma he went through, and his ability to try and ignore that it happened. I liked that it was debatable whether or not Marbury was real, or if he'd invented the whole thing in a method of escapism. I didn't care for the ending that much, because I liked it when it was all in Jack's head much better. I still liked the open-endedness of it, about which of their worlds was real, though. The reason I'm giving this book lesser stars, when the premise alone and the quality of the writing should have made me give it five, was that it had a level of homophobia that, while I understood it because that's how teenage boys talk unfortunately, it also left me uncomfortable.



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