The Tribe trilogy has to be one of the best Young Adult fantasy series I've read in a long time - beginning with The Tribe trilogy has to be one of the best Young Adult fantasy series I've read in a long time - beginning with and then , the trilogy is fresh and original, very well-written and peopled with characters I quickly came to love and care for. Not only that, but it interweaves Aboriginal culture and philosophy to present a less westernised view of the world, and as flawed and tragic as this post-apocalyptic world is, I actually want to live there, in this place where the trees and the spiders are just as valued as human life.
In The Foretelling of Georgie Spider the story comes to a satisfying conclusion. Georgie is Ashala's friend from her old life; the two fled rather than be captured and held forever in a detention centre. Yes, this series goes straight to the heart of a cruel and inhumane government policy of Australia's: holding refugees and asylum seekers in awful detention centres both on-shore and off-shore, where they are subjected to abuse and fall into severe depression. Here, the "mutated" children of this world are treated in this way, because they are different and declared "unlawful", again speaking so clearly to the ease with which white people decide who is worthy and who is not (I say "white people" deliberately, because this is an Australian series and speaks so empathetically to this cultural practice, and because the Aboriginal author, Ambelin Kwaymullina, is also directly addressing past government policy in which Aboriginal peoples were classed among the flora and fauna, not as human beings).
As political and philosophical as the story truly is, it is also the compelling story of human determinism, love and courage, trust and an appreciation for life in all its forms. Having finished the trilogy, I feel both bereft and impatient to re-read it (Which, sadly, will have to wait). If I could endlessly recommend any book or series to you, it would be this one. It has all the things I love in fiction, and the only negative is that Kwaymullina took it down from an original four-book series to a trilogy. But it was a good call; no drawn-out, padded and over-bloated story here! I'm eager for what she writes next, though, that's for sure!...more
Well, it's done. It's over. Finito. I think, after all this time, there was a part of me that never expected this series to actually end, and a part oWell, it's done. It's over. Finito. I think, after all this time, there was a part of me that never expected this series to actually end, and a part of me is in shock that it finally has. This is, after all, my absolute favourite series, a series that I have been reading since I was in primary school (the first book came out in 1988, and I read it two or three years later). Each book has required a lengthy, patient wait (George R R Martin fans think they have to wait a long time - he's got nothing on Carmody!!), and each time I have been well-rewarded for it. Because I began this series as a story-hungry, imaginative child, Carmody's words and ideas have had a long-lasting impact on me. Such is the way with childhood favourites, against which nothing negative can be said. Others I have talked to have Tolkien, To Kill a Mockingbird, Little Women or some other novel that they read as a child and absorbed into their soul. For me, it was Obernewtyn and Jane Eyre. Such stories stay with you as formative parts of your childhood, woven into your DNA, there to stay.
I don't know that it's possible to write a summary of this book or discuss it without spoilers, so I will simply say that I won't give out any spoilers for this final volume, but if you haven't read the first six books, there may be spoilers.
The sixth book, , ended with Elspeth Gordie and her companions finding the Beforetime city in the desert, and being rendered unconscious by a man in a silver suit. The Red Queen begins with Elspeth rising to consciousness, and discovering that someone - the man - is trying to put her into a cryopod, for a frozen sleep. Her Talent enables her to resist it, as she is deemed an anomaly. When next she wakes, it is to find herself reunited with four of her companions inside a place called Habitat, a strange, inescapable place inhabited by a passive, highly-regulated population of people who believe everything beyond its walls is gone. They speak to God, who grants wishes, and have a unique punishment for transgressions, of which there are few.
What seems at first to be a dangerous delay in the fulfilment of Elspeth's quest, turns out to be an important step: Habitat was begun by Hannah Seraphim, one of the two women from the Beforetime who left messages, clues and artefacts that Elspeth needs in order to find and destroy Sentinel, the computermachine that controls the Balance of Terror weaponmachines that caused the first Cataclysm - or Great White as it's known. A second one, triggered by Sentinel, would destroy absolutely everything and everyone, with no chance of recovery. Elspeth was tasked with this quest at the end of the second book, The Farseekers, by the giant Agyllian birds that saved her and healed her, and have since been watching over her. Her nemesis is Ariel, a mad boy from she knew when she first arrived at Obernewtyn, now a man hungry for power working closely with anyone who can further it.
While Elspeth's quest as the Seeker is the ultimate goal, she has been closely involved in other plots along the way; in The Red Queen, it is the return of the rightful queen of the Redport, a city far from Elspeth's Land which has long been ruled by Gadfian slavetraders. As with Habitat, Elspeth isn't sure if getting involved in an uprising in Redport is a distraction, a delay or a necessary part of her quest, but as everything seems to converge there - Ariel's presence, the location of Sentinel, the final message or clue left for her by the other Beforetime woman, Cassandra - helping her friend Dragon reclaim her throne is yet another piece of the puzzle.
I was worried about the gap between this book and the previous one which, while not as lengthy as such gaps usually are in this series, was still long enough for me to feel like I'd forgotten too many details. But even though I couldn't recall every character mentioned in The Red Queen, or every plot detail in full, Elspeth provides her usual introspection and exposition, as she strives to piece things together and come to understand all the new things she's learned about her world and its past, so that I was soon refreshed and caught up. The story might be slow for some, but I find the discussion and mulling necessary - it contributes to the solid and deep world-building and adds realism, for Elspeth is truly from a place and time in which everything from Before is gone, especially knowledge, yet she is dealing with things from the past which require understanding. The divide between her and the time of the Great White is so vast, she would never be able to succeed as the Seeker without puzzling everything out. And she is the Seeker, after all. It makes the story feel less like a fast-paced action film and more like a true story, putting you right there in her head, figuring things out with her - because her Beforetime is our future, or a possible one, and certainly a plausible one.
One of the things I absolutely love about Carmody's writing is her skilful way of incorporating philosophical insights regarding humanity, our place in the world, and human interactions. In The Red Queen, the slow buildup and intensely vivid world-building takes its next and final stage in some philosophical musings on the nature of humanity's dependence on technology, and the concept of intelligent, and even feeling, technology. For the most part, Elspeth is wary of the Beforetime technology they encounter, such as God, the impressive computermachine that runs Habitat, and its two 'andrones', the silver men. (Maybe that's a slight spoiler, but this is where the reader is a step ahead of the Misfits in figuring things out - it was an easy guess that God and the 'tumen' were artificial lifeforms from the Beforetime.) With their post-apocalyptic perspective, Elspeth and her companions discuss and raise questions around the seemingly infallible nature of computer programs - never more relevant than now, it seems, as computers become such an intrinsic part of our everyday lives. As Elspeth cynically but rightly points out (and I've lost the quote, sorry), computer programs are only as good as the humans that write them - mistakes and flaws can be written in, and since humans are inherently flawed, it's to be expected. The naming of the computer 'God' at Midland seems deeply ironic. The story is not a treatise against technology, but a cautionary one reminding us that the true nature of humanity is one rich in flaws.
Another element of this story that I love is the embracing of other and diverse life forms, from the Misfits strange and wonderful Talents - including empathy, farseeking (telepathy), coercion, beastspeeking, futuretelling and healing - to the range of intelligent and feeling beasts they work alongside. Animals are drawn to Elspeth not because she's also a beastspeaker, but because she is the Elspeth Innle of a beastlegend in which she leads them to freedom from humans. A deep sense of compassion and respect for animals and the land pervades the Obernewtyn Chronicles, weaving in animal characters into the story who become just as important as the human ones.
And really, ultimately, nothing beats the sheer pleasure of watching it all come together. It's an impressive weave of story threads, as small details, foretellings, dreams, characters, chance comments and all come together and are woven in. It rather boggles my mind, the amount of planning that must go into it! It's an exciting adventure, at its heart, and an utter joy to discover how it plays out. Especially with a heroine like Elspeth, who doesn't recognise her own charisma or charm, but comes across as quite serious and blind to the deeper emotions of those around her. She is without affectation or pretension, and has the right characteristics to be able to put her own desires aside in order to save the world. She's a lonely girl/woman, and I think that's another quality that drew me to her from a young age, as an introvert myself. For the longest time, Elspeth has been like a larger-than-life figure for me, a mythological heroine, a close relative about whose exploits you hear, wide-eyed and in awe. Reaching the end of this series is harder than finishing Harry Potter, say, because of how young I was when I began, and how long it's taken to write the series. But the best thing? I can keep re-reading. I've re-read earlier books in the series several times, and they never grow old. There's so much detail in them, and the writing is so riveting, for me, that it's always like reading them fresh, even when my mind can picture where it's going next. The tension is still there, the revelations, the excitement, the joy.
If there's one series you should start that you have yet to, it's this one. It might technically be a Young Adult series, but it's only a marketing technicality. There's plenty here for all ages. Read, enjoy, and tell me what you think. Mostly I just sharing the stories I love!...more
The Tribe is my new favourite series, and I am eagerly, impatiently awaiting the next two instalments. Having devoured the first, The Tribe is my new favourite series, and I am eagerly, impatiently awaiting the next two instalments. Having devoured the first, , in January this year, I quickly went out to get a copy of the second book, which did not disappoint in the slightest.
Following on from the events of the first book, the Tribe is somewhat more structured, involved and purposeful - maybe it's because I'm currently reading the final Obernewtyn book, but there are similarities between the two series, which only makes me cleave to this one all the more. They are young, they have unique abilities, and they have a deep and profound love and respect for the natural world - and this is a strong component of both the world-building and the Indigenous culture from which Kwaymullina comes.
Ember Crow is Ashala Wolf's best friend and, in effect, second in command of the Tribe. Now, suddenly, she is missing, and as Ashala and the Tribe track her down they learn incredible secrets about Ember and the 'family' she comes from, secrets that open up a whole new dimension to this post-apocalyptic world still in recovery, and reveal a threat they hadn't known existed.
I honestly couldn't recommend this series highly enough. It is riveting, engrossing, exciting, surprising, imaginative, intelligent and captivating. Can I squeeze any more adjectives into that sentence? I love the concept, I love the Aboriginal aspects and I love the world-building, but I especially love the characters, who are becoming as dear to me as the Obernewtyn cast is. Speaking of, it is a relief to have another excellent post-apocalyptic fantasy series like this one to go one with, now that the Obernewtyn Chronicles is finally complete. The Tribe books are already on my "I need to re-read ASAP" list, and I'm on tenterhooks waiting for the next two....more
The third and final full-length novel in the Shatter Me series (which includes two e-novellas) decides firmly, once and for all, whether Mafi wanted tThe third and final full-length novel in the Shatter Me series (which includes two e-novellas) decides firmly, once and for all, whether Mafi wanted to write a science fiction/speculative fiction story, or a romance. The answer? Romance, in a sci-fi world. More than that, it's a coming-of-age story for its young protagonist-narrator, Juliette. Everything she's been through culminates in a triumphant ending in Ignite Me, and I can't say I'm at all disappointed.
Trouble is, how do you review the third and final book in a trilogy (or the fifth part in a series, whichever way you look at it) without giving away what came before? How do you review it in such a way that you are actually reviewing the final book while also, possibly, encouraging new readers to start from the beginning? That is, essentially, what I'd like to do here, but the truth is I read this in March - over three months ago - and it's not all that fresh in my head anymore.
For as much as I love a good romance - like, really really love - and for as much as Mafi delivers on that front, I am still disappointed by the thinly-sketched out world-building. This is a place of climatic catastrophe in our near future, a place that suffered a vacuum of power into which stepped a totalitarian regime (the Reestablishment) seeking to completely oppress the working people (which is almost everyone who isn't a soldier in the regime - and they, too, come from those families and are supporting them even while the repress them). Of course, the limited world-building comes from Juliette's limited worldview: not only is she ignorant of this world, as are we, but unlike us, she's not particularly curious about it. And that spells problems for the very ending, and the new step Juliette takes - which I won't spell out because it's a spoiler.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, though with less heat than before: There's no reason why a Young Adult title can't be intelligent, sophisticated, meaningful, and above all, well fleshed out. There's smarts here, and some really powerful imagery and insights, but as with so many other YA speculative fiction books, the world-building is thin on the ground. And that's a huge shame. I'm not asking for pages of exposition, endless descriptions of boring details. Just a few well-placed details, a timely explanation here and there where appropriate, would go far. There are hints, but they often get derailed because of how Juliette internalises everything and makes it personal.
"You think you've had it hard," [Adam's] saying to me. "Living in psych wards and being thrown in jail - you think that was difficult. But what you don't realise is that you've always had a roof over your head, and food delivered to you on a regular basis." His hands are clenching, unclenching. "And that's more than most people will ever have. You have no idea what it's really like to live out here - no idea what it's like to starve and watch your family die in front of you. You have no idea," he says to me, "what it means to truly suffer. Sometimes I think you live in some fantasy land where everyone survives on optimism - but it doesn't work that way out here. In this world you're either alive, about to die, or dead. There's no romance in it. No illusion. So don't try to pretend you have any idea what it means to be alive today. Right now. Because you don't."
Words, I think, are such unpredictable creatures.
No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh. [pp.120-1]
I love these powerful insights, I do; they're raw and honest and powerful and poetic. But I also need context for the characters' very existence. For the plot to make sense. And in a story like this, context is in world-building. Hints are fine. Using my imagination to fill in the gaps is great. But you need limits first, a border, an outline. Shatter Me has always been a bit sketchy on that front; or maybe that's because I'm an adult reader and not the intended audience. I'm slightly terrified of re-reading, as an adult, a science fiction-romance novel I read over and over again as a teenager, and finding I have the same complaints - because I didn't have them when I was younger, that's for sure. So how much of this is a real criticism and how much of it is a jaded adult griping, I can never really know for sure.
What undoubtedly saves this book, and the series, is Mafi's determined, unapologetic focus on the troubled relationship between Juliette and Warner, that seemingly psychotic, amoral, evil young man with the angelic face and hot body. The perfect villain-slash-hero. A complete fantasy, and yet Mafi succeeds in bringing the humanity out of Warner and rendering him believable. Ignite Me is really about Juliette moving past her earlier impression of Warner and learning about the person within, and coming to terms with her own feelings for him. Forgiving him, and herself. Letting go of her own black-and-white worldview to see the grey that's all around her. What we get is a rather tragic unearthing of Warner that just makes him all the more loveable.
This is Warner's room. And Warner, to me, is no longer something to be afraid of.
These past few months have transformed him in my eyes, and these past two days have been full of revelations that I'm still recovering from. I can't deny that he seems different to me now.
I feel like I understand him in a way I never did before.
He's like a terrified, tortured animal. A creature who spent his whole life being beaten, abused, and caged away. He was forced into a life he never asked for, and was never given an opportunity to choose anything else. And though he's been given all the tools to kill a person, he's too emotionally tortured to be able to use those skills against his own father - the very man who taught him to be a murderer. Because somehow, in some strange, inexplicable way, he still wants his father to love him.
And I understand that.
I really, really do. [pp.186-7]
Other readers have noted this, and I have to agree with them, that it's not necessary to demonise one character (in this case, Adam) in order to make another (in this case, Warner), seem like a better love interest. That said, people change, grow, go through crap and get moody - in general, Juliette isn't the only one figuring stuff out and acting like a cow at times. But while Juliette is discovering the "grey" in Warner, she seems to be cementing Adam in a narrow, black-and-white world, which just goes to show that she's still got a long way to go, in terms of growing up and growing wiser. As self-indulgent as she is, she seems incapable of truly thinking and caring about someone other than herself, at the rate of more than one person at a time. Then again, she is an adolescent. It's a hard, rocky road to self-realisation.
The climax, when it finally comes, seems rushed and brief compared to the long, drawn-out set-up that takes up the bulk of the novel. Yet I didn't mind it. I think I preferred it to a long, drawn-out climax. Climaxes should be brief - they should be climactic. But I did find the resolution at the very end to be a bit ... truncated. It works, and yet I wanted more. On the other hand, had I got more, it might have seemed unnecessary, indulgent, and taken away from the oomph of the ending. Thing is, overturning the entrenched, abusive dystopian power in place - the goal of such stories as this - is only the beginning. Rebuilding is a whole other story, and I would love to read that. The ending is the birth of a whole new world; a world that has a long way to go and will suffer greatly along the way; a world peopled by X-Men like characters (love it!). I don't know what Mafi is planning on writing next, but I don't feel ready to say goodbye to these characters or this world. Juliette doesn't need us anymore, it would be time for a new protagonist to step forward, into this equally-dangerous and unknown new world. I would love to be there for that journey....more
**spoiler alert** Ten year old Melanie is a very special girl. Her life follows a specific and unchanging routine, and it is the only world she knows.**spoiler alert** Ten year old Melanie is a very special girl. Her life follows a specific and unchanging routine, and it is the only world she knows. In the morning, they come into her cell and strap her into a wheelchair while aiming guns at her; they even strap her head in place. Then she is wheeled into a windowless classroom along with over twenty other children, all strapped into wheelchairs. They have several teachers, but Melanie's favourite is Miss Justineau, who tells them stories from Greek mythology. The only difference is on Sundays, when they are wheeled into the shower room and given a chemical bath, and then a plate of grubs to eat.
Melanie, like all the other children in the underground military base, is special. She's a fully cognisant zombie - or "hungry", as they're called. Infected with the fungas just as much as any other hungry, she has retained her intellect - and her emotions, not that the lead scientist on base, Dr Caldwell, believes she possesses any. Melanie is special: she's brighter than any of the other children, and as she discovers, she's able to control her hunger.
While Helen Justineau humanises the children and reports her observations, Sergeant Parks collects them from the hungry-infested deserted urban centres, and Dr Caroline Caldwell dissects them, hoping to understand the fungus and find a way to beat it. Twenty years is all it's been since the Breakdown - there are men on Parks' team who are too young to know about life before then. Now there are those living in the city of Beacon, south of London, and those who take their chances in hungry territory: Junkers.
When an attack on the base catches them all by surprise and forces them to flee, Melanie finds herself with Miss Justineau, Sergeant Parks, the dreaded Dr Caldwell, and a young private, Gallagher, as they try to make their way back to Beacon. Along the way trust and loyalty will be sorely tested, and motivations questioned. Above all, though, little Melanie must re-learn her understanding of the world and her place in it, and what it means to be human in this new world.
The Girl with all the Gifts began as a short story called "Iphigenia in Aulis" which he wrote for an anthology edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni Kelner, and is already in the works as a screenplay (it has a very clear and definite movie feel to it - you can really see it as a film). MR Carey - who usually writes as Mike Carey - writes for DC and Marvel (he's the current writer of X-Men and the Ultimate Fantastic Four, and wrote Hellblazer and Lucifer, as well as a comic adaptation of Neil Gaiman's . Speculative Fiction of various genres is clearly something he's good at, and in his new novel those strengths - of being able to paint a scene quickly and succinctly, of being able to create tension and develop characters without losing (or giving in to) genre tropes - really shines through. Granted, the use of present tense doesn't add anything to the narrative, but it wasn't too distracting.
On the back cover, author drew a connection between this book and Kazuo Ishiguro's , and - especially in the first part - that parallel is very apt (and one of the reasons that prompted me to get this). As in Ishiguro's creepy and intense novel, Melanie and her unusual peers are considered less than human, with the adults refusing to notice any signs that might undermine their belief - their need to believe - that they have anything in common. To believe in an inherent humanity in these children would mean they couldn't do what they do to them - not without feeling guilty or less than human, themselves. This is akin to the colonising attitudes of Europeans in the Americas, Australia and Africa, but we certainly do it already towards, say, the disabled or mentally ill, and homeless people, to name a few.
I've said before that I'm not a fan of zombie stories; I've read a few and seen a few movies and two things always put me off or make me feel downright depressed: that zombies are inherently uninteresting because they are mindless and have only one goal; and that you can't win against zombies. If you survive, it's only temporary. Bleak, very bleak stuff. Even the comedies are bleak, at heart. MR Carey has created a distinctly fresh zombie story, and in the process animated some interest in them for me. He has skilfully retained the elements of gory horror and apocalyptic survival, created some interesting and diverse characters to traverse the landscape, and provided a very satisfying yet chilling ending to this standalone novel. More importantly, though, is that you quickly get the sense this isn't your run-of-the-mill zombie story. Zombies are a way of telling a more important story, one that delves deep into human nature in all its variants, and looks sharply at the things we hold dear and what we're willing to do to avoid change, destruction or ultimate death.
We get to know Melanie well in The Girl with all the Gifts, and quickly come to sympathise with her and feel a need to love and protect her - things she yearns for without really understanding it. Miss Justineau feels it too, though she's also repulsed by it; at least at first. It isn't hard to see where the genius of Carey's creation lies: I can't think of any other zombie story where zombie children play such a huge part. Certainly, I don't think we could bare to watch a zombie movie where a rotting child gets their head smashed in. Zombie or not, that's just too repellent. At first I thought this might bear a few too many similarities with Justin Cronin's (I've read that Carey hadn't read Cronin's books until after The Girl was published), but thankfully the only things they have in common is a little girl being a central character in an apocalyptic world.
The atmosphere is just right, neither overdone nor lacking in tension. Twenty years isn't a very long time, but it's long enough for desolation to set in, long enough for the people who knew what it was like before to be turning philosophical, and short enough that they're still letting themselves belief they can change it, fix it, get back the way of life they once took for granted. Which makes the ending all the more poignant. There's a nice tone of bleakness, especially from Sergeant Parks, while Dr Caldwell is so driven and single-minded that she's become the Mad Scientist character.
So that old stuff is literally priceless. Parks gets that. They're trying to find a way to remake the world twenty years after it fell apart, and the goodies that the grab-bag patrols bring home are ... well, they're a rope bridge over a bottomless canyon. They're the only way of getting from this besieged here to a there where everything is back in good order.
But he feels like they lost their way somewhere. When they found the first of the weird kids, and some grunt who'd obviously never heard about curiosity and the cat called in a fucking observation report.
Nice going, soldier. Because you couldn't keep from observing, the grab-baggers suddenly got a whole slew of new orders. Bring us one of those kids. Let's take a good long look at him/her/it.
And the techies looked, and then the scientists looked, and they got the itch to kill a few cats, too. Hungries with human reactions? Human behaviours? Human-level brain functions? Hungries who can do something besides run and feed? And they're running naked and feral through the streets of the inner cities, right alongside the regular variety? What's the deal? [pp.70-71]
Visually, it's very arresting, especially with that element of nature taking over running through it. It's not quite Day of the Triffids, but when you see fungal trees growing out of hungries' (dead-dead) bodies, it definitely feels very alien and wrong. And horrific. That after everything, and despite our insistence in our own superiority, humans - and only humans - have been felled by a fungus. It almost makes you want to giggle. One thing that does always bother me, about this and other zombie stories, but especially this one (because of the ending), is what zombies are supposed to live on, long-term. Without the surviving population of non-zombie humans, they've got no food source. It goes against all we know of life, nature, survival, the food chain, etc. It's just something that bugs me while I'm reading zombie stories, like having some lump digging into your thigh when you sit on the ground.
I found The Girl with all the Gifts to be riveting, disturbing and, overall, entertaining while still being provocative and insightful....more
In April I finally read a Honey Brown novel, which I'd been trying to find the time for ever since I got back to Australia in late 2013 and was able tIn April I finally read a Honey Brown novel, which I'd been trying to find the time for ever since I got back to Australia in late 2013 and was able to get copies of her books (they weren't available in Canada). This Australian psychological thriller writer came highly recommended by other bloggers, and in many ways Red Queen did not disappoint. It had the additional intrigue of an apocalyptic setting, which I love. In this case, it's a global breakdown of society following a contagious, plague-like disease. Brothers Rohan and Shannon Scott have isolated themselves at the family cabin in the bush, which their father - one of those types who expected the world to end and wanted to prepare for it - had fully stocked, complete with hidden containers full of everything you could possibly need to survive the apocalypse. Rohan is the older, highly controlling and charismatic brother, Shannon his less reliable dependent. They take turns with the gun, keeping watch all night, knowing that should anyone find them not only do they risk catching the disease, but their stores could be stolen. So it is Shannon's fault - for putting down the gun and picking up his guitar - when they discover that a stranger has got into the house, touched everything, even left a note to taunt them. The stranger is Denny Cassidy, a beautiful woman desperate to join them. Rohan doesn't trust her, but both brothers are drawn to her. Is it a trap, is everything just a cold-blooded strategy to lull them into dropping their guard - is someone else out there, waiting for a signal?
Red Queen has the tension and suspense, the intrigue and mystery, and the complicated characters that good fiction like this needs. I think, though, that the ending took me by surprise. After all the edginess and the near-constant pendulum swing between Denny is a manipulator to Denny is a victim and Rohan's the bastard, the ending was both pleasing and somehow a let-down. It was just too nice. Maybe it's the adrenaline comedown. I can imagine it is supremely difficult to write in this genre without the ending turning into a cliche, because there just aren't many options available and audience expectations are high. This book also highlighted for me my trouble with genre fiction in general, as I look for those unanswerable questions about life, existence, being human, relationships - questions that make me see things in new ways without ever trying to answer them (god forbid), that isn't the role of art. Unfortunately, for as much as I enjoyed this novel and found it as engrossing as I wanted it to be, it didn't really seem to take on any big ideas, or issues. Monogamy, maybe, and trust. Compassion as the root of being humane. The idea that selfishness and isolation are the prerequisites for survival is challenged; more predictably, the need men have for the comfort of women in order to be more balanced and human is emphasised. Still, with this debut novel Honey Brown proves herself to be a very promising writer, and I'm glad I have a few more of her books to read....more
The day begins like any other day for seventeen-year-old Findlay. Breakfast with his younger brother, Max, and stepmother Kara; catching the bus to scThe day begins like any other day for seventeen-year-old Findlay. Breakfast with his younger brother, Max, and stepmother Kara; catching the bus to school with Lucy Tenningworth; a lecture on social responsibility from his English teacher, Mr Effrez, who encourages the class to skip school the next day to attend a protest against nuclear tests; and studying with Lucy in the library after school.
But the day ends anything but normally. His mother, who works for the government consulting on disaster response management, calls and tells him to go to the supermarket and get as much non-perishable food and bottled water as he can carry and get home. The nuclear tests in Asia have gone ahead and all they know is that the north and Gobi Desert have been hit. Entire countries have been wiped out. There's no video feed from the area, no survivors to say what's happened, but it won't be long before the fallout covers the globe.
At home, Fin's uptight, alpha father is unconvinced of any real danger, and conversation quickly degenerates into an argument which sees Kara leaving for her mother's place and their father following without a thought for his kids. They never return. Fin and Max are on their own as dirty grey snow begins to fall, the power is off and the roads are icy. The phones aren't working, there's no communication from the government, but Fin isn't taking any chances and warns his neighbour not to let her kids play in the snow.
Fin's only idea is to find his mum. After months of living on canned beans and rice and sleeping in front of the fire, the food is running out, they're burning the furniture and then books to stay warm, and it's clear they've been abandoned by the government. If he's going to go out into that now-dangerous, unknown world, it has to be now, before things get worse. With his brother and two friends, Fin embarks on a trip from the Blue Mountains to Sydney in the hope of finding his mother at the heart of whatever command is left, helping to plan the country's response to this disaster.
Leaving town opens their eyes to the full reality of what has happened, and what is being done - or not. Getting into the heart of Sydney is no easy feat, but Fin is determined, if not for himself than for his little brother. Nothing about his world is the same, new rules apply, and death is always just a step around the corner.
I love Apocalyptic stories like this and have read a fair few. This is easily one of my favourites. It's not that it's terribly original - apocalyptic novels usually follow one of a bare few plot structures, since you need to stick to a realistic scenario to make it work. And it's not that it's free of clichés, either: there are plenty of those. But the writing just flows so naturally; Fin is a great character and carries the narration and the story so well; the story has excitement and danger and unpredictability while maintaining realism, making the tension far stronger because of it; and it doesn't become bogged down in trite teenage drama or romance. There's a romantic angle, between Fin and Lucy, but it doesn't take over the story like to many YA novels these days.
In fact, this was easily one of the best YA Speculative Fiction-Apocalyptic novels I've read, right up there with Tomorrow When the War Began, for instance. It's miles above and beyond the interminably dull , and spoke to me much more strongly even than some adult apocalyptic novels, like . It's not comparable to McCormac's in terms of writing or story, it doesn't have that quality of utter bleakness, but as far as great apocalyptic stories go, it's the details that make both The Road and The Sky So Heavy work - the details and the grittiness. The Sky So Heavy has such a strong sense of realism and tension and Zorn's writing brings Fin's story so vividly to life, that while reading it I had to look out the window from time to time to remind - and reassure - myself that it hadn't actually happened. It was confronting, even nail-bitingly tense at times, and while you know Fin survives, you don't know what he'll lose in the process - or whether he'll survive in the long run.
This is more than just an end-of-the-world Young Adult novel, though. It also raises some interesting and highly relevant political themes. The nuclear testing scenario seems, at first, almost old-fashioned - the Cold War has ended, after all. But thanks to North Korea, it's been very much in the spotlight again in recent years. Zorn doesn't say what country in Asia set off bombs, but it's implied that it's North Korea. Closer to home, the disaster raises an ugly truth: an internal Us versus Them prejudice - not along race lines, as you might imagine with Australia's high Asian population, but along class lines. Who is dispensable, who is worth saving? Not only the country and rural towns are left for dead, but the outer suburbs of the major cities as well. There is only so much food, and anyone considered valuable is brought to the city centre by the army. Everyone else is left to slowly die.
Fin comes face-to-face with this new, heartless reality, and how people justify it to themselves. Fin himself has to face his decision to steal food from another person, and putting the hero of the story into that position adds depth to the realism of the story. The good guy isn't perfect, he's just human. It makes it harder to condemn the people in the city centres who are still receiving handouts of food from the army, who turn on people from outside the fence for stealing their food. Living and surviving is far from black-and-white, and Zorn's strength lies in her ability to present different perspectives and no clear answer with understated clarity.
I did mention that this isn't an original story or plot: an end-of-the-world situation, a survivor who bands together with other survivors, embarking on a journey in the hope of a positive outcome, having to make life-or-death decisions of the kind that affect others, and, of course, there's no real end in sight. An apocalyptic disaster doesn't just resolve itself or go away in a few weeks, like Fin's dad arrogantly declares it will. As for the clichés, the main one is the character of Noll, or Arnold Wang, the lone Asian misfit at school who is taunted but almost never reacts, who turns out to be a solid companion as well as a prosaic, thoughtful young man who makes them face their own consciences. It is the school-outcast-turned-friend that will be familiar to readers, but I love what Zorn did with Noll's character. She doesn't change him, but gives Fin a chance to realise how petty and mean they'd been at school. It's a nice subtle way of reminding teens that bullying others is, well, stupid. The person you bully today may be in the position to save your life tomorrow, and are you worth saving? (We're not talking apocalypses here, but any situation in which you'd need help.)
In a way, the genre itself will always shape the general plot of an apocalyptic story, because it will always have to follow a certain pattern. It's what you do with that structure, those clichés, that make each story different from the others. Zorn's debut novel is an excellent addition to the canon, a great, exciting and nicely thought-provoking story for teens and equally engaging to adult readers. I read this as a stand-alone novel, and I hope it remains so: while there's room for a sequel, I love the open-endedness of the ending, and letting a sense of hope linger in the air like the echo of a dying song. My interest in apocalyptic stories tends to wane if they're drawn out too long, because it just becomes about death and more death, and it's hard to make room for growth and hope in that. I'm happy with this as a standalone novel - I'm not even going to complain about the use of present tense - and I highly recommend it to readers who enjoy survival adventure stories, stories about the heart of humanity and the lengths we are willing to go to preserve human life on this planet. Truly an excellent achievement in the genre. ...more
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