one trick pony

 by Nathan Hale
Amulet 2017

He's a one-trick pony
One trick is all that horse can do
~Paul Simon

The future of Earth looks pretty grim here. Humans have reverted back to their near hunter-gatherer state, though in a relatively short period of time as they are still away of the sort of technology we are looking at in our not so distant future -- things like sentient robots, and space shuttles that the robots know how to pilot. The problem is that there are probes out there, called pipers, collecting all the metals and technologies they can find, gobbling their way across the planet like massive termites, putting bubbles around valuable minerals and metals and sending them to the sky to... well, they're gone.

The story starts with a trio of forgers who are hunting for anything the pipers might have missed, members of a caravan of massive vehicles that contain and entire community and are serving as an ark to help rebuild mankind. Strata, a headstrong girl, discovers something buried in the sand in a cave, something the pipers missed: a full-sized robot horse named Kleidi. Strata's contact seems to have awakened the horse and set up a bonding between them. Freeing Kelidi from the sands they discover a whole technology center underground full of robots that had previously been powered down, and when powered up their electronic signals alert local pipers who come to capture as much as they can.

But Strata, Kelidi, and the others escape. Barely. Barely escaping is what they do best throughout the book.

Saying much more is probably too much, and more than I knew going in.

There's a side tale of the Pied Piper that is used to explain the pipers here, but it's a McGuffin, a ruse, and a clever one at that because the reality of what is going on has nothing to do with what the survivors understand to be the truth.

And what of that pony and it's one trick?

Ah, well, what that trick is comes pretty quick, and it occasionally has something to do with the many close calls our heroes has, but can that one trick save the day?

About half way through this book I wasn't sure it was going to end satisfactorily. I was actually saddened to think I was either going to abandon the book or write a negative review. Actually, my biggest concern was that it was a set-up for a series (which it still could be) that ended without a resolution. But no, the story arc works, and given that machines are involved, a little deus ex machina isn't a bad thing here.

Hale is known to many for his nonfiction Hazardous Tales series of graphic novel history, but when he steps away from that (Rapunzel's Revenge, Calamity Jack, both with Shannon Hale) he leans in hard on the fantasy. Here, the dystopic sci-fi agrees with his style, so much so that the pipers initially reminded me of the work of the late French artist Moebius, and the muted one-color palate gives the world he's created a slightly grimy metal feel, as it should.

Adults worried that it might be too intense for younger readers should let the readers decide. As with all books really. I'd think a 5th or 6th grader into sci-fi (as I was into Bradbury at that age) would dig this pony. And they wouldn't think twice about the fact that the main characters are a girl and her horse.

The Eleventh Plague

by Jeff Hirsch
Scholastic 2011

I'm going to pose a seemingly nonsensical riddle worthy of the Mad Hatter: How are good dystopian novels like gangster films from the 1930s?

In a future very near to us war has broken out between the US and China, where biological weapons were used to unleash virus that brought about a world-wide pandemic and plague. In a distant future, sixteen years after the war, chaos reigns as small enclaves of survivors eek out primitive lives as society tries to pull itself back together. Small bands of scavengers brave the wilds sifting through the detritus of shopping malls and downed aircraft looking for anything of value to trade for food or necessities. America, it seems, is little more than pockets of feudal communities clinging tenaciously to the way things were with roving bands of ex-military slave traders looking to trade the only commodity left on the planet. This is the backdrop against which The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch begins.

For his entire sixteen years all Stephen has known is the nomadic life under the direction of his ex-Marine grandfather, and the book opens with Stephen and his dad burying the patriarch who like millions before him has succumbed to the plague. There is a sense of being relieved of a burden while at the same time being set adrift. Stephen and his father will continue as they have, as scavengers looking to trade for sustenance, but is that really all they want from life?

Holed up in an abandoned plane during a storm, Stephen and his dad encounter a group of slavers with some newly caught slaves. Their moral compasses properly set, they attempt to free the slaves but are barely able to flee for their own lives. During the escape Stephen's father is injured and falls into a coma, and while nursing him he is taken by what he believes are a rival band of slavers. Instead he is taken to the town of Settler's Landing where, for the first time, Stephen catches a glimpse of what life was like before he was born.

Unlike some of the other encampments of survivors trying to make their way in the new world, Settler's Landing is engaged on returning things to as close to normal as possible. They farm, the have a school for children, kids play baseball, and they all live in homes that were clearly part of a gated community before things went bad. They are shut off from the rest of the world and doing just fine, but Stephen's life has taught him to be wary of strangers even as they have the medicine and knowledge to keep his dad from dying. Slowly Stephen accepts his place in the community, drawn to another orphan, Jenny, a Chinese girl who has a chip on her shoulder as big as they come. It is Jenny the misfit outsider who shows Stephen some of the cracks in the facade of Settler's Landing, and its her wild anti-authoritarian mischief that spins the story into it's second act examination of whether mankind is simply doomed to destroy itself.

When I first was aware of this book last fall I gave it a glance and then put it aside. It felt a little too much like well-trod territory. Then recently I overheard someone in a bookstore rhapsodize over it because "it has a positive, hopeful ending."

That got me thinking: don't all good dystopias have this sense, this need, for a cathartic ending?

The question then is: what, exactly, is a "good" or hopeful ending for a story about how human civilization has brought itself to the brink of extinction? Is it a return to the old, comfortable world we currently live in or the promise of something new learned from the ashes of the old?

I think this may be the most valuable point of conversation for teens about these dystopias they are drawn to – what exactly is it that gives them more comfort, and ending where the world will turn back to where it was, or a world that has learned and will move forward? In some ways I think this is a trick question, because in order to accept that this bleak future will bring about change is to suggest that everything the way it is now is entirely (or nearly so) wrong. And yet, with the glimmer of hope on the horizon, there isn't really a concrete sense of what that next step would be. It's like belling the cat to say "all we have to do to change things is..." but if we're so smart then why can't we change things without nearly annihilating civilization?

But I have an alternate theory about why people are drawn to these dark futures, and it mirrors a time of great anxiety in American history where stories of crime and violence engaged the imaginations of movie-going audiences of that era. Let's look back at the question I opened with.

The answer to the riddle about dystopias and gangster films lies in what people want from their narrative entertainment, be it movies, TV, or books. In the 1920s and 30s during the depression and prohibition there was a rise in the gangster movie, films that seemed to celebrate the lives of notorious criminals and fictitious public enemies. At a time when people had so little beyond their economic anxieties, there was some satisfaction in watching the stories of people bold enough to take what they wanted, by any means of force necessary. Audiences rooted for these "bad guys" as they moved from one murderous exploit to another... but only up to a point. In the end, the gangster had to die. He had to. There was no way for an audience to reconcile rooting for the bad and feeling good about it unless there was a cathartic moment of justice in the end. It was okay to ride along on the sideboards of those big cars while people were being tommy-gunned so long as we knew that the world would be put to right in the end.

And this is where I think we are with modern dystopian novels. The economy is in the dumps, wages have stagnated while corporate profits have boomed, we're actually in worse times economically than during the Great Depression, so we need some sort of diversion that makes us feel better at the end of the day. Our current anxieties about the world demand some sort of outlet. We need to see the world worse than it currently is in order to feel like things aren't so bad, and like a gangster movie, readers want to delve into these dark futures but only if they can emerge with a sense that things are not as bad as they seem. They want to emerge from the book and find some comfort in the world they currently live in, not worry about how to change it. If these dystopias truly were suggesting a global change was necessary they would set about showing readers a road map out of our current path toward these dark places, but they do not. To do so would risk becoming pedantic on the safe side and propaganda on the extreme.

People didn't leave gangster movies wanting to take up a sub machine gun to shoot up the town, just as kids who read dystopic novels don't put down the book feeling a sense of nihilistic hopelessness. This idea of these books being to "dark" comes from adult denial of just how dark the world looks to kids at the moment. Historically, teens have always felt the older generations have screwed things up and should just get the hell out of their way. So if you think a dark work of fiction is more detrimental to a child's mind than, say, our current divisive political climate or the profits-over-people mindset of big business, then, as the hippies used to say, you're part of the problem.

Fix the world and the books will fix themselves.

This review is cross-posted today with Guys Lit Wire, home to all things teen boy readers might like. 

Brain Jack

by Brian Falkner
Random House  2010


In a post-post-9/11 America, the most deadly threat comes from the Internet, and Sam and a small cadre of young hackers are the sole line of defense...  

Sam is a hacker, a freak, a natural.  He can code on the fly and read viruses and cut them off before they can do any damage. And like any teen boy he uses these powers for good, which is to say he and his buddy Fargas dip into a large multinational company so they can dip into their bank accounts and order up some sweet new laptops and neural headsets that allow you to jack into the Internet world through thought waves.

Seeing as this is the near dystopic future, life isn't all roses.  Terrorists have taken out Las Vegas with a nuclear weapon and Homeland Security is now on par with the CIA in terms of proactively making sure the US remains protected.  The problem is that this includes attacks via the Internet, and Sam's little cyber crime has alerted the big boys.  He thinks he's free and clear until he attends a super secret hacker's convention that in turn becomes an online meet-up on the White House servers which, in fact, is really a sting operation to catch Sam.  Once caught, it takes him only a few short weeks to figure out how to get out of the minimum security facility... and right into the arms of Homeland Security, who set the entire thing up as a sort of protracted pre-employment test.  It was the only way to find the best of the best, and Sam passed with flying colors.  It also means he either works for the government, or he returns to jail.

Once he's working for Homeland Security Sam's job is to serve as wingman for Dodge, a punk he'd encountered back at the hacker convention.  Their job is to monitor Internet traffic and sniff out potential threats.  One attack appears to destroy them one moment, and then in the next be their savior. This phantom of the Internet also removes spammers and online gaming, things many are happy to see gone.  But as they try to understand what is going on Sam senses something darker is in the works, something dangerous that involves the neuro headsets that get people addicted to being so jacked into the Internet that, like his fried Fargas, they cease to do anything but stay plugged in until they die.

And once Sam figures that out, all hell breaks loose.  Like internal civil war and mass hypnosis hell.  Families torn apart, one branch of the military against the other type of hell.  Can Sam and his friends save the country before it destroys itself?  And if he can, will Sam be destroyed in the process?

This story has fingerprints of The Matrix all over it, what with an entire world full of people jacked into a world where they can just "know" things due to the collective hive mind.  But the battle scenes with virus attacks read like air-to-air fighter jet combat, written with assured technical jargon and a very real sense that this sort of thing could be happening in our future.  Faulkner's plotting and pacing is perfect, the jogs between real world action and battle online taut, and there isn't a single page of fat or filler to be found.  Books that push beyond 200 pages have to prove themselves to me, but half way through these 350 pages I knew I was in good hands and eagerly wanted to know how Falkner was going to make this work.

It has been a long time since I picked up a book that I wanted to race to the end of, and if this isn't already optioned for a major motion picture then someone is asleep at the wheel.  That said, I hope someone in Hollywood is asleep at the wheel, because this book could so easily be ruined in the wrong hands.

As for that phantom that takes over the Internet and sets the country against itself, I believe Pogo said it best: We have met the enemy and he is us.

Rot & Ruin

by Jonathan Maberry
Simon & Schuster  2010

Deja vu?  Perhaps.  I am cross-posting this review from Guys Lit Wire today.

The zombie apocalypse has happened.  Never mind how, it just did, fourteen years ago when Benny was eighteen months old and was spirited away from his parents by his half-brother Tom before they became victims themselves.  Since then, the living have taken to enclosed cities and let the undead roam in what is now called the Rot and Ruin.

Fifteen is the age of maturity, and that means getting a part-time job in order to continue receiving rations. Benny, like many teens, doesn't really want to work, and he certainly doesn't want to take up the family business of becoming a bounty hunter of the undead.  Worse, his brother Tom is legendary, but all Benny knows ans remembers of his much-older brother is that he was a coward who ran away and left their parents to become zombies.

There are plenty of other bounty hunters though, guys like Charlie and The Hammer who told war stories of their times in the Rot and Ruin and talked up their kills in ways Tom never did. Benny could never understand why his brother never talked about work, or why Tom was so revered by town elders, but he finds out quick enough when he finally agrees to become his brother's apprentice after failing at pretty much every other job he attempts.  One trip into the Rot and Ruin changes everything Benny ever knew, or thought he knew, about what it means to be human, both living and undead.

While zombies are currently in vogue and it would seem there is little to add to canon of kill-or-be-killed, Jonathan Maberry's Rot & Ruin takes the idea of a world full of the undead and makes it a dystopia where questions of good and evil become slippery.  Is a zombie out for brains any worse than the people who use them for blood sports?  Can the dead and undead coexist in a delicate test of God's will, and what of the moral ambiguity in believing that murder is wrong but murdering zombies is okay; after all, zombies were and are still human beings, right?  And what sort of "civilized" society has been preserved when, in financial desperation, the living would subject themselves to enter a fighting ring to do combat with zombies for the entertainment of others, where a blind eye is turned away from those citizen who organize such contests?

The zombie apocalypse could stand in for anything – a plague, global thermonuclear war, or even world-wide environmental collapse.  What Maberry poses is that no matter how it comes about, how we behave afterward defines who we are as a society, and what Benny learns quickly is that his whole life he and his friends have been sheltered from the reality that the post-apocalyptic world is not a pretty place.  Whacking zombies sounds like fun until you begin to attach names and families to the undead, until you realize that the "other" you're out to kill could easily be a friend or relative.

I can't be the first person to think this, but I've been wondering about the rise of zombies in popular culture recently and in doing so came to an oddly chilling conclusion.  When monsters have become popular in our cultural entertainment they usually do so as a surrogate for some other fear.  Nuclear war and radioactive fallout gave us the mutant monsters of the 1950s.  The rise of horror films in the 1980s reinforced messages of morality at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic.  The rise of vampires has been slow and steady for some time, but dawning of zombies is more than a replacement for any trend, it seems to tap into a deeply rooted fear of something in Western culture that is dark and difficult to understand or deal with in a rational way.

Like fundamentalist terrorism.

This may have been the farthest thought from Maberry's intention with Rot & Ruin, but in showing the remains of civilization as a gated community under constant threat from brain-dead outsiders who are, by lack of choice, simply trying to survive, I can't help but see the metaphor for what we are seeing today in the world.  While the United States continues to promote and preserve its freedoms as a gated, civilized community, the rest of the world remains a threat to those very ideas simply by wanting an equal chance at the good life.  Of course, to make this analogy I would have to equate the zombies for Islamic fundamentalist terrorists out for blood, but isn't that the image we inside the gates are fed all the time by politicians and the media?  And what if, like Benny, we come to learn that these people are just that, people, and that as long as we continue to demonize them or use them for our own expendable purposes we will forever be at war.

Politics aside, its an engrossing take on the dystopic zombie apocalypse, and a solid adventure that can be enjoyed at the surface level as well.

Dark Life

by Kat Falls
Scholastic  2010

A dystopic sci-fi hybrid of life between settlers who have gone to homestead the sea and the topsiders who remain on land in overcrowded conditions.  And a child shall lead them... 

Living and farming under the sea with his family, Ty cannot wait to turn 18 and claim a homestead of his own.  One of the first children born and raised entirely in the ocean, Ty's abilities and instincts seem almost super-human.  His skin has the sheen of luminescence from eating deep sea fish, but what of his being able to see and hear things others cannot?

The arrival of Gemma, a topsider and ward of the surviving Commonwealth, comes looking for her lost brother in order to become emancipated from the welfare system and so they can live happily as a family again.  She suspects he's gone prospecting which puts her in 16 year old Ty's world, a sort of a reverse of the fish out of water.

Additionally, there's a gang of criminals who have been stealing from the homesteaders, who have been supplying the topsiders with food grown in the ocean, creating a tense situation between all sides.  The homesteaders are charged with bringing in the undersea thugs or risk losing their supplies from the mainland, Gemma must find her brother, and Ty finds himself up to his neck in danger as it becomes clear that he possesses a Dark Gift that makes him either special... or a threat.

I have to admit that I guessed most of the twists in this story early on but was compelled to read onward for the descriptions of life under the sea.  Falls does a fun job of thinking through this world and making it seem plausible even in moments when I doubted the possibilities.  In a lot of ways it's no different than a story set on a Martian colony, except that it's based on Earth, in the ocean, and that's a subject I find intrinsically fascinating.  What would it be like to live under the water, to adapt to the environment, to suddenly have the other 70% of the world available to you to explore.  Yeah, yeah, ambiguities between good and bad guys, uh huh, strange new human superpowers, whatever, just give me more of what life is like under the sea!

It doesn't come as a surprise that this has already been optioned for a movie – Falls is a professor of screenwriting, and the pacing of a feature film is all there.  Though to be honest the inevitability of the ending causes the action to feel drawn out because so much action has to be explained where in a film it would all flash by in visuals that take up much less time.  I'm starting to wonder if that isn't the actual root of the problem I have with a lot of kidlit being about 100 to 150 pages too long; that authors are writing more cinematically and in doing so find themselves given in to recording detail better handled in pre-production by set designers and special effects departments. 

The book is solidly middle grade, but I suspect that Hollywood will gear the movie toward an older teen audience much like they did with The Lightening Thief.  The book's strength is in it balance of politics and action (at least until the final action scenes) and if I could have hoped for more it would have been in understanding how and why it takes the homesteaders so long to have a teen boy explain to them why the topsiders need the frontiersmen and women more than the other way around.  But like I said, give me a story about humans colonizing the sea and I'll forgive it just about anything.

Candor

by Pam Bachorz
Egmont 2009

How do you deal with unruly teens? Send them to live in the mind-controlled community of Candor, Florida.

Oscar's father built Candor in the wake of losing his oldest son. The town is a model community, perfect picket fences and everyone striving for greatness. To achieve this effect Oscar's father built subliminal mind control into the town's architecture, through music constantly playing and reinforcing only the messages he wants.

But Oscar's mother resented her husband's methods and left. Oscar was strong-willed and able to resist the messages long enough to teach himself how to counter-program himself and other rich kids for a price. He's helps a dozen or so kids escape and set himself up a little secret offshore bank account. He could leave any time he wants, but he'd rather help others get out while they can since he can keep up the charade without giving into the messages that totally remove his personality and turn him into a robot like the other teens.

Problems arrive in the guise of a girl, Nia, who fascinates Oscar. She's a hard case, but Oscar eventually convinces her that he's not the model citizen everyone believes and he's slowly preparing her to escape. Because he's in love with her. But Nia's parents don't feel her personality is conforming fast enough and they send her to a special room Oscar's dad has set up where she spends four days having her brain wiped clean of "bad" behavior and replaced by his extreme programming. Once out, Nia is as brainwashed as all the other kids and Oscar decides to risk everything to save her.

Author Bachorz lived in the planned community of Celebration, the "perfect" town created by the Walt Disney Company. If you've seen the Jim Carey movie The Truman Show you can picture this sort of community perfectly, because they filmed the movie there. Superimpose another movie, The Stepford Wives, on top of that and you've pretty much got Candor. Which is not to say it's a bad idea - it totally feeds into the notion teens have about their parents wanting them to be perfect little robots - but it isn't without problems.

Mostly what bothers me is that is the entire community is being fed messages, that would include adults and they wouldn't be able to argue about the treatment of their children (as they do here) because they wouldn't understand it. Oscar's dad, the staff at the hospital, all the adults are somehow immune to this subliminal messaging, and that selectivity just isn't possible in a town where the messages are 24/7. Oscar proves that deprogramming is possible, and the kids who are taken off-message do have to maintain a veneer of still being model Candor citizens for fear of being found out, but there's no sense that the adults are going through this same sort of counter-programming. Oscar's dad, who must maintain control over every aspect of the town's carefully planned existence, could not remain as analytical as he is if he weren't somehow constantly unaffected.

That this detail is never explained (either that or I blinked and I missed it) crushes the novel for me. World building in sci-fi and fantasy, including real world dystopias like Candor, live and die by their ability to not let the world outside the book take over. At every turn I was constantly finding myself pushed out of the narrative and wondering how this was possible, how these people were affected while others were not, and ultimately how a town could be built on mind control by someone without a degree in psychology and be kept secret from the outside world. This last part is most puzzling, as kids who graduate and leave Candor must do so with a pre-recorded set of "messages" to keep them in line else they will suffer from psychosis. One family is reported to have gone on vacation, forgotten their messages, and killed themselves and each other in a hotel as the programming "wore off." It all just doesn't hold up well under close scrutiny.

I ran this book by my resident 13 year old dystopia expert, and while she enjoyed it she had nothing to say about it afterward. This is unusual because most of the time she wants to talk about the Big Ideas that speculative fiction generates. When I posed the question of the adults not being influenced by the messages she had a couple of theories, but nothing that came from the book itself.

A for the idea, C- for the effort.

NYC dystopia x2

Today, I am cross-posting with Guys Lit Wire, the blog for books aimed at teen boys.

dys·to·pi·a –noun. a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

Well, there's plenty of that going around in a pair of books I'm featuring today, both of them set in New York City but written 40 years apart from one another.

First up is the dead and the gone, Susan Beth Pfeffer's sequel to Life As We Knew It. As with the previous book, the events that follow occur after an asteroid has hit the moon, knocking it out of its former orbit. Where Life As We Knew It was set in rural Pennsylvania and followed closely the struggle for survival as seen from a teen girl's perspective, the dead and the gone shows us how events unraveled through the eyes of Alex Morales, a seventeen year old boy living in Manhattan.

Alex is the second-eldest of the Morales children, his older brother Carlos is a Marine stationed on the West Coast. Alex's mom is a nurse on night duty when the book begins, possibly on her way home. His father is in Puerto Rico attending the funeral of Alex's grandmother. At home, Alex's two younger sisters wait for him to return from his night job working at a pizza parlor. The news of the asteroid's collision course is peripheral at best; most people are listening to the baseball game.

Unraveled is the best way to describe events that follow. As the shifting of the moon has profound effects on the planet's delicate ecosystem, tides have flooded the subways and knocked out all satellite transmissions. Quickly Alex moves into survival mode in order to protect his sisters and keep the family together. When his sisters ask about the safety of their missing parents Alex reassures them without hesitation that everything will be okay. Alex is as pragmatic as he is protective, shunting his emotions in order to assure their survival.

Where events felt more ominous in Pfeffer's previous exploration of this disaster scenario, here in New York City the events that unfold seem merely to hasten the inevitable. As the food shortages and flu epidemic spread, as the rich get out of town and the poor are trapped on an island left for dead, New York comes to represent the ultimate failure of the urban model of living, an unsustainable wasteland. Alex casually learns to lie and steal and, in the end, manage to get himself and one of his sisters successfully out of New York and toward a promise of a new life further inland.

Recently released for its 40th anniversary, Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! gives us another version of the Big Apple in decay. The events are no less ecological, though the cause is man-made this time.

It's the future, the end of the millennium. You'll have to forgive a book written in the 1960's for getting the future of 1999 wrong, though in many ways the book does correctly understand some of the probelms we're facing today. Harrison's premise was that the US was unconcerned with population control and that short-sidedness led to a planet where the population outstripped its resources. Greenhouse gases have ruined rich agricultural farmland, food and water is scarce, New York city is under a constant heat wave. As Harrison paints it, only the date of this scenario might be wrong as we may still be headed in this direction under global warming.

I have to break the review here to interject that this book was nothing like I had remembered it to be. I had this strange sense of double deja vu because there are familiar elements in the story that echoed both a movie adaptation of this book and the sudden realization that my disappointment was the same I felt when I first read this book as a teen. The movie was Soylent Green, and the disappointment I felt then as now was that there is no such thing as Soylent Green in the book. That is to say, if you've seen the movie and you think you know what the book is about, you don't.

Harrison tells the story of a police detective named Andy Rusch who happens to land on a case of murder that was a crime of opportunity. The problem is that the corrupt politicos believe there's something deeper going on and Andy's forced to continue to follow through on the investigation beyond when it should have been dropped. There's a girl involved, a gangster's moll, who takes up with Andy once she's out of her meal ticket. And darting through the story is the thug on the lam who shows us the seamier underside of a New York Harbor clogged with decommissioned Liberty Ships used as emergency housing for the world's refugees.

What Harrison has done is graft a noirish crime story onto a New York City that has collapsed under the weight of its population. It's a dirty, ugly world with rationed water, no electricity, a black market for produce and meat, and corruption at every level of government. Where the dead and the gone gives us the quick death of NYC Make Room! Make Room! gives us the tail end of the long, slow demise. Both versions, as written, are equally plausible portraits of a city in decay.

But in a head-to-head grudge match it's Pfeffer's book hands down as the better read. Pfeffer's book continues to draw out the disaster in diary format, one day at a time, inviting the reader to put themselves in Alex's shoes in deciding whether or not he's made the right decisions. the dead and the gone deals somewhat flatly with Alex as a protector of his sisters and there is little for him emotionally. Harrison's book has a more balanced emotional story at it's heart with Andy questioning love and what it means to live in this rotten world, but in imagining the worst aspects of his world into our future he retained some ugly racial and sexist stereotypes that, while "authentic" for a reader back in 1966, detract from the story.

the dead and the gone
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt Children's Books 2008

Life As We Knew It
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt Children's Books 2006

Make Room! Make Room!
by Harry Harrison
Tor Books 2008