*Thank you to Hatchette Kids for sending me a copy of Floored and letting me be apart of the blog tour promo team for this book*
Floored has been one of my most anticipated books of this year since i found out about it. The idea behind the book is challenging to say the least, with Sara Barnard, Melinda Salisbury, Non Pratt, Holly Bourne, Eleanor Wood, Lisa Williamson and Tanya Byrne all involved in the writing of Floored. It sounded like it was going to be a wild ride and i had high hopes on it being excellent as i have already adored the work of these authors for a long time.
Luckily, this book did not disappoint me at all. Floored follows six teenagers as they grow up, meeting once a year after being involved in a somewhat life changing event as strangers together. It has a similar idea to One Day by David Nicholls, but with far more characters. All together the book is tied up by a narrator. Once the group meet at the start of a novel, it then follows their lives individually and together for the next six years, exploring what it really means to be friends when you don’t live in your friends pockets.
One of the big games with this book is trying to figure out who wrote what parts. There are six characters to the story, Hugo, Dawson, Joe, Sasha, Kaityln and Velvet, who each take a few pages per chapter to update you on their lives one year on, and then follows a narrator who tells the story of the group all together that year. For the most part, this is the format, and it does sound more complicated on paper than it is while you’re reading it. The massive strength in this book i found is that each character has a very unique voice and personality. There are many reasons why this is important to the story (that i’ll get around to in a bit), but more than anything it separates them and allows you to truly understand a character as an individual. I had no trouble remembering who was who right from the start, and i think these are characters that will stay with me for a very long time.
I really appreciated the difference in people in this story to prove that you can create a friendship with anyone. Very often in YA groups of the same kind of people are friends, and admittedly in real life this does happen quite often. However, there are times when you’re thrown with people who you’d never imagine in your life, and this story above anything championed friendship and the fact that you can truly have anyone in your life as long as you’re willing to make a little bit of effort to keep them there. It felt very important to me to show these characters growing up to the age of twenty-one together – seeing them blossom in to adults and their relationships change with it.
Without a doubt there are a few stereotypes that weren’t needed in this book. To define the characters and separate them, maybe, however i found some of the stereotypes a little uncomfortable to read. Admittedly each stereotyped person had some overriding characteristic above the social norm that i really did appreciate. This was just a small flaw that i didn’t love about the story.
I found that all the characters were well developed and all had the same amount of back story to them. I really would have loved more back story for some if i’m honest. I’m still intrigued by Joe and Sasha, and i would have loved a lot more information on Hugo in the end. It is a contemporary novel though and i guess we can’t have everything crammed in to 400 pages.
Floored without a doubt will be on my favourite books of the year list at the end of 2018. I loved it so much and it was easy to read, keeping you entertained and fast paced. The authors involved did an incredible job with the planning of this story and deserve all the praise they’ll get for it.
The Little Contemporary Corner 