Voiceless by E.G. Wilson- Review

Adelaide Te Ngawai was thirteen when Maunga Richards stole her voice.

I have been friends with E.G. Wilson and have closely followed her writing endeavors for the past five years. Needless to say, I went into this book with great excitement and wasn’t disappointed, although there are a few criticisms that I have although they might not be as major to some people as to me.

Voiceless is set in a futuristic New Zealand where a new disease called Vox Pox has begun to appear. This disease not only disables the ability of the infected to speak, but also steals away their entire creative ability. When Adelaide, a young writer, is infected with this disease by the seemingly heartless Maunga Richards, she learns how to live with it. That is until her brother Theo is also infected with the disease. It is then that Addy decides that she must find out why Maunga stole her voice and find a cure by entering a virtual psychoreality simulator.

During her time in the simulator, Addy finds herself face-to-face with different kinds of trials that bend the imagination and play with one’s mind. Eventually, she finds what she is looking for but also realizes that not everything is as it seems.

I love Wilson’s imagination. There are some things in this book that I would not have been able to conjure myself, especially all the scientific aspects– I guess that is why she writes in sci-fi and I don’t! However, I would have liked to see more of the simulator and experience some more of the dangers that it could present to the characters. In quite a few cases, I felt that there was a lack of true peril.

The characters were well-crafted in my opinion, my favorite being Seth whose story I will not speak of for the sake of keeping the surprise.

Despite there not being an entirely true climax, the ending to the story was exciting and will cause readers to want to read the sequel, Expression, as soon as it comes out.