Review - 'Poke' by Dalya Moon

Poke by Dalya Moon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Synopsis:
'Zan is a teenage boy with a talent for discovering any girl’s secrets. If he asks a girl to poke her finger into his navel, he gets a psychic trip to Secret Town. Zan never likes what he finds.

When he meets mysterious, beautiful Austin, with her waist-length hair and mature laugh, he wants to get acquainted with her the slow way. Austin, however, can’t resist her curiosity, and when she pokes her finger into Zan’s belly button, he sees … nothing.

Austin dashes out of Zan’s house and out of his life, leaving Zan heartbroken and confused. To find peace, he must unravel the secret of his power. Is it a gift, or a curse? How can Zan love someone with no future? How can he not?

Poke is a fast-paced story about Zan's adventurous summer, as he battles witches, experiments with astral projection, and discovers the secret of his strange power, all to be with the girl he loves.'

I must admit that I really liked this book. At first I was super intrigued how a power such as a 'psychic belly button' could be written about without it seeming to be a bit silly and I was quite impressed in the end.
This was a very fast paced read and is probably a book that could be finished in a day if you had the time to get through it in one sitting.
It seemed to tick all the right boxes that make a book interesting - death of the lead character Zan's parents when he was really young, a 'gift' passed on from his father to stop him being betrayed by a woman like he was, serious notes surrounding Zan's love for Austin, a girl he has a one night stand with who has an inoperable brain tumour and light-hearted humour surrounding his belly button powers. All this set amongst your typical teenage obsessions and one-track mind mentality.
The author really knows how to create a picture of what she is writing about and there is a dream sequence which decribes a very interesting concept in how our childhood memories are stored in our minds which I thought was very clever.
I definitely found this story to be engaging and a nice quick read to pass the time with.


Michelle xx