Sweet

So I just finished reading this book, Sweet by Emmy Laybourne. Saw the recommendation from GoodReads. Some of the reviews there said that the story is very creepy, however it did not pass the threshold of creepy for me. Its a really simple story. Theres a villain who wants to destroy the world and to balance the equation, there's a someone to save the day. In this case, there's more than someone. Actually, the entire time I was reading this book, I was thinking of a Totally Spies episode I watched as a kid. In that episode, celebrities get kidnapped in a plane that flies so fast around the world, it turns the world backwards and subsequently reverses time. Also, the plane has no plans to land. However, in this story, the villain basically wanted to localize all fat and lazy people and kill them all before proceeding to a wider scale of killing all fat people on planet earth.

In the picture is Clover, being exited about Blinkjet - the cruise plane. Well, since I remember this episode so clearly, I could only picture everyone excited to be on the cruise (in the novel), to be as excited as Clover here in Totally Spies.

Anyway, back to the novel. The villain's dad created a drink called Pipop. Its kinda like a soft-drink containing a lot of sugar. People started drinking it, and the drink became famous. However, people who got fat started blaming him for creating that drink in the first place, and causing them to be fat. Hence the son (the Villain, Almstead) creates a diet sweetener. This sweetener allows you to lose weight. So, you can basically eat anything, and while on this sweetener, you will only lose weight. This sweetener is called Solu. Unfortunately, Solu turns out to be an addictive drug, that causes people to lose weight too fast and get addicted to it. Their addiction is so great that when they were deprived of Solu, they started to kill and drink the blood of others who have ingested the drug. 

Who saves the day? The girl who was seasick (caused her not to eat anything), and also a guy who had a personal trainer for his body image. His trainer controlled his food and he laid off desserts, long enough to find out the problem with it. Also, the crew of the ship weren't allowed to have Solu. The story was fast moving, so the love story cultured between them didn't evoke much feelings in me, but it was still acceptable. Yeah, I'm totally okay with suddenly finding yourself kissing a guy in your closet, just a couple of days after meeting him, although you have seen him on television before. 

Almstead planned to kill all these fat celebrities on the ship. This cruise was set to sail for 6 days, and on the sixth day, Solu was to be sold to the country and the rest of the world. Almstead planned to fake his death by exploding the ship, and then watch the cannibalism/vampirism situation in the world from the private island he bought. However, Laurel (the girl), came up with the plan of attracting the bunch of hungry zombies in withdrawal, by pouring a drink diluted with Solu on Almstead's head. Apparently, these addicts can smell Solu from a mile away. They barge into his office and tear him apart - because everyone wants their own share. Tom breaks his ankle in the mess. 

Fast forward a little, the crew escapes on life rafts, and Tom & Laurel volunteered to blow up the ship to attract attention (Helicopters maybe), and hoping they will be able to tell the world from their video recording that Solu is bad for them. However, in a last struggle, Tom loses consciousness leaving Laurel alone. Laurel finds one last raft and puts him on it while she goes to blow up the bom Almstead planned to detonate. However, when she does it, she realizes it has a 60 seconds countdown. She jumps off the cruise ship and swims hard towards Tom, now approx 100m from the ship. 

The ship explodes and both of them get sucked in the explosion vortex and they lose consciousness. They survive the blast and they were brought to a hospital of unknown location. The nurses were speaking in Spanish. Tom and Laurel wake up and they watch the news. The news reader mentions that Solu is bad, but the reader also exclaims that she is already on her third dose of Solu, and she was feeling fantastic! Tom & Laurel were too late. The villain wins this time. Thank god for that. For once, the villain did it right, although no entirely, because he died. Well, I guess in that world, all the fat people are going to die. The description in this story wasn't very good, or perhaps you could say my imagination is not that good. Either way, images weren't painted on my mind that well. The story was fast moving, and that's another thing I liked about this novel. Otherwise, its just a typical villain-hero story with not much of a twist. See ya!