Concentr8 by William Sutcliffe

William Sutcliffe is an author I have followed and loved since reading New Boy in 1997, although this is his first YA novel I read.

I wanted to love it, but it's hard when the first quarter of the book nothing actually happens. And I mean nothing. It was hard getting through those pages.

Blaze is not the leader of a gang of scum from one of London’s rather squalid areas. They have been on a diet of crap and Concentr8 (a drug for ADHD) for most of their life. During a riot brought on by the removal of the drug they kidnap a worker from the mayor’s office. The major is Boris Johnson and Sutcliffe doesn’t even try to hide this fact, even down to his blonde hair. So begins five days in the warehouse they are holed up in.

Told in multiple first-person perspectives the structure of which I did like we suffer as everyone in the warehouse does the author’s ineptness of doing this story some justice?

It would appear that Sutcliffe had an idea for the novel but like the story itself it didn’t know where it was going. Maybe that was his idea all along. If it was then STOP doing it. In your head it might seem like a good strategy but when it gets put on paper the story has more holes than a seasoned junkie.

Disappointed

½/5