Silver reading log

Silver is a novel written by Chris Wooding. A boy is bitten by a mysterious silver beetle, he becomes the first victim of the mysterious infection that is soon to spread without the children of the school knowing. This virus is unknown as it takes the students and teacher by surprise. Flesh starts to mold into metal and humans transform into machines as the virus expands at a rapid pace the victims thirst for blood. The children of the boarding school that remain uninfected barricade themselves inside trying to wait out help. Paul and friends fight a seemingless losing battle against this virus.

A character I found intriguing was Paul. Paul was the new kid at this boarding school and when he arrived was hiding a major secret from the rest of his school. Although quiet, Paul was a natural leader and was always doing things for other people. “Sometimes there doesn’t need to be a why, stuff doesn’t happen because we deserve it or we don’t . It just happens.” Paul mentioned this quote when this event first took place, at this point he is new to meet the people and wants to find a way out of it to return back to his normal life. Personally, I can relate to this quite a lot as sometimes situations can get out of hand and you just want to return back to your normal life.

A message I took from this novel is no matter what you are you will always care for something. “ Even monsters care for their own.” When Paul first said this the infected monsters were retreating carrying there wounded others away from the fight they had just lost against Paul and friends. Although pursuing the humans to infect them the infected still aided each others wounds and made sure they were all okay. Personally I feel this is extremely important in life as without others you wouldn’t be what you are today. I am extremely grateful for my friends and family and always look to support them through their hard times because I do need them in my life.

A challenge that occurred throughout the film was learning how to adapt to the infecteds changes. When making weapons to defend themselves the survivors learned that the infected adapted to what they were using extremely quickly and had to make new weapons constantly. An example of this is when the survivors made flash bombs, at first the flash from the infected for a short while but after a while the infected learnt to close their eyelids to block the flash from hitting them. This was a major problem for the survivors as weapons after weapons were displaying to be useless after a while.

I feel the title of this book is appropriate as it describes the main events of the book which is how a virus turns humans into machines (silver).

Personally I would recommend this book to a younger audience as it can be quite childish in the sense it’s like transforming people and doesn’t provide as much life lessons as other books may do.