I admit it took me a little while what with the summer holidays starting and the kids at home and all that. Not that it took long to read the book. No, once I'd started I pretty much read it straight through - it's that sort of book - it just took me a while to find the time to write the review. But we're here now, so....
Let's start with the unputdownable thing. This is actually two stories interwoven with each other. The first is told from the viewpoint of a present day 'typical teenager' called Icie, who find herself torn from her normal life by a 911 text message from her scientist parents. The second is set centuries later and focuses mainly on Beckett, the leader of a small band of survivors. Icie's story is fast-paced and stuffed full of cliff-hangers. Beckett's is thoughtful and mysterious. And the novel alternates between each so that an Icie action cliff-hanger is followed by a Beckett mystery one and so on. And that's what makes it so difficult to put down. (And, incidentally, why you shouldn't think of reading all of one story and then the other.)
Icie, as I've said is a typical teenager. She's obsessed with her phone, she's got boy problems, and a best friend who shares her passion for coining new words and disseminating via social networking to the whole local community. Normally she would pretty much ignore a text from her geeky parents, but 911 is the code for utmost emergency and when she gets home she finds them both packed and ready to escape a threatened terrorist attack involving a mysterious and deadly biological agent.
This being a YA story, the parents are lost pretty early on and Icie soon finds herself picking up a rag-taggle collection of companions comprising a shaved-headed cheerleader, a spoilt little 12 year old boy and a brooding mystery guy with whom, you just know, Icie is going to become emotionally entangled. Together they struggle through the chaos and hysteria caused by the attack to find their way to an abandoned nuclear bunker where they can be safe until the contagion has passed. It's not a pretty journey. The disease is ghastly but Icie isn't the nicest of heroines either. She's tough and she can make the hard decisions - a sort of Katniss Everdeen without the killing and hair obsessions - but she grows up as the book progresses and her experiences change her for the better.
Beckett's story is totally different. This is more about the mystery. Clearly there's some connection between his story and Icie's. For a start he and his followers live on a mountain near Vegas. Icie's bunker is under a mountain near Vegas. They must be the same. And then there is their weird religion. They worship the Great I AM, they have a language that seems to have derived from Icie's but with meanings that have slipped on the way. Adepts in the religion are cheerleaders. The little children are rockstars and the Twitter reads from the sacred texts of Sayings. And at the end of each Saying they all say 'Whatever'. I love this. It's witty but it fits and it seems to make Beckett's struggle to understand who he is and where he comes from all the more poignant.
There is violence in Beckett's story. His little group are petrified of 'terrorists', their term for outsiders. So when Beckett befriends a girl from 'Vega', you know trouble will follow. But for all of this, Beckett's story still has a quieter, more thoughtful feel to Icie's and that makes the whole novel all the more powerful.
I could go on but I don't what to reveal the 'deadly secret'. I enjoyed Sara's first YA novel, Dark Parties, but this one is even better. You sense that her experience at Working Partners really pays off here. If you only read one 'dystopian' novel this summer, read this one. There's a freshness about the writing and it makes you think too. I loved it.
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