BROKEN SKY by Lee Weatherly: reviewed by Gillian Philip

"Everyone has to believe in something," says Amity Vancour's little brother, Hal. He means, of course, that people need to believe; but as it turns out, an awful lot of people love to believe in something. What Hal has not yet seen, at the quarter-point in this chilling novel, is a population persuaded with alarming ease to believe willingly, gladly, joyfully in something entirely irrational. 

I say 'chilling', but L.A. Weatherly's Broken Sky is more of a spine-freeze. Following the Cataclysm – a nuclear conflagration a couple of thousand years ago – the world has essentially been rebooted. Amity Vancour lives in an era that is more or less the 1940s, but second-time-around. And this time, humanity seems to have learned its lesson. 

Wars have happened in this universe – it's what people do – but Amity's own grandmother Louise, who lived through an appalling one, was instrumental in putting an end to them forever. The world is now overseen by the World for Peace, an international organisation that prioritises and ranks inter-state conflicts, then resolves them. The instruments of this admirable policy are the Peacefighters, a noble force who fight for their countries' rights against one another, at great personal risk but with none to civilians or large armies. For this service, Peacefighters are idolised by a grateful population – and fully trusted. Their thrilling Firedove [Spitfire] duels take place in the skies above the WfP complex, neutral territory in the Western Seaboard where the pilots of all nations socialise (when they're not engaged in aerial combat with one another). This world is not utopia, but it feels like the best version of humanity, and the Peacefighters are at its heart.

Enter John Gunnison, the demagogue who rules the neighbouring Central States – and who eyes the Western Seaboard with avarice. The Peacefights have been going his way lately, so Amity is thrilled and proud when her win in a duel retains the Western Seaboard's oil rights for five years. When that result is overturned for reasons she doesn't understand, the first doubts creep in – and when pilots begin to die in straightforward fights, things quickly get a lot more sinister.

Gunnison is a tremendous and shockingly believable villain. When we finally meet him, through Weatherly's secondary character Kay, his charisma shines, and it's clear how he has reached the pinnacle of power. His genius has been to manipulate the population with astrology; his strength comes from his genuine, fanatical belief. Astrological charts are cast for every citizen of the Central States; a Discordant outcome results in correction camps, torture and death. And while Gunnison's belief is sincere, those around him survive by knowing just how to manipulate a chart to make him happy. Kay prides herself on knowing how to read people; resourceful and ruthless, she is determined to reach his inner circle and stay alive.

Broken Sky begins with Amity on the run, alone and desperate and terrified for the life of her lover and childhood friend, Collie. From this heart-in-mouth flash-forward, Weatherly takes us back to Amity's previous golden existence as a respected Peacefighter, and the great mystery begins: how did she get from there to here? The story rarely lets up the tension, and when it does it's only for touching interludes of love and family life. Amity is a splendid protagonist, courageous, compassionate and able; and we fall in love with Collie almost as thoroughly as she does. But don't let me give the impression there's sentimentality in the romance; Peacefighters can't afford it. These are tough, passionate, honest warriors and their relationship feels real. 

What also feels very real is the world they live in. I felt sorriest for a character we never meet: President Lopez of the Western Seaboard, a politician doing his best for a nation that is increasingly unhappy and deprived as the Peacefights go against them. The people of the WS gaze with envy at the prosperous Central States and its strong, charismatic leader, and they begin to wonder if astrology can do the same wonders for them. They don't know – or don't want to know – about the Discordants and their fate. 

One of the creepiest aspects of the novel is the Astrology shops that begin to pop up with increasing frequency in the Western Seaboard; everyone has to believe in something. Astrology might seem like a stretch as a way to hypnotise a population; but Weatherly makes it an entirely believable phenomenon. And why not? These are not the first nations to fall wholesale for the joyfully bombastic rallies of a demagogue. Soon everyone's wearing their star sign on their lapel; after all, it's just a brooch, just a bit of fun. It's not as if it'll ever be obligatory... but what if Gunnison's right? What if the Discordants are somehow responsible for everyone's problems? Harmony is a benevolent ideal, isn't it? Perhaps a truly perfect world is within reach if Discordant elements can be neutralised.  

Lee Weatherly does a magnificent job of examining the good intentions of humanity, and the fragility of those ideals when put into practice. Good people succumb to temptation; good people begin to think about ends, and the means they are willing to tolerate in their pursuit. Good people decide to believe in bad people, and it's never going to end well.

Action, romance, heartbreak, betrayal, agonising guilt and heart-stopping tension: Broken Sky has it all. Oh, and fascinatingly detailed Spitfire dogfights. And delightful future-historical period detail. And TWISTS; dear Lord, the twists. And by the way, it's more than suitable for fully-grown adults as well as young ones. 

I should stop before I gush any more about this tremendous book (the first in a trilogy), but I'll leave you with a link to Lee Weatherly's Broken Sky Pinterest board (I was going to steal some illustrations from it, but the choice is too difficult). And besides, I found this shot of Ms Weatherly in a Spitfire: 

BROKEN SKY by Lee Weatherly; Usborne, £8.99

Broken Sky on Pinterest

www.gillianphilip.com 

Return to REVIEWS HOMEPAGE

The Firebird Trilogy by Nick Green reviewed by Julia Jones

I've just read the three parts of Nick Green's Firebird Trilogy as one big book. It's been a terrific experience and I'd happily go back to the beginning and start again.

Leo Lloyd Jones is a teenage joy-rider from Salford who is picked – accidentally, he assumes – to be part of an elite group of youngsters who might be required to rehabilitate the world in the case of cosmic catastrophe. This is Project Firebird. Now I don't normally do much in the way of cosmic catastrophe and my appetite for dystopias is distinctly limited. But I love adventure and stroppy teenagers and their capacity for moral decisions and courage and emotion and idealism and that's what Project Firebird gave me.

Leo's quality is leadership, the indefinable sort which is something quite different from ambition or the desire for power. Most of the time he's completely unaware of it but when push comes to shove he's usually able to make the right choices and find the words to inspire others. On his first day at Project Firebird he is sitting next to fourteen year old Rhys Carnavon, the fit, good-looking ' natural leader' who has just trekked back from Antarctica after witnessing the death of his scientist father. The shifting relationship between Leo and Rhys is a main plot strand running throughout the trilogy. It's complex, does not allow for second guessing and has a resonance beyond the individual characters. It's one of the reasons I'd like to read the trilogy again.

Plotting is excellent throughout. For me the books really began to sing at the shift between volumes one and two, Project Firebird to Firebird Dawn. The shock at the beginning of the second volume was, I thought, brilliantly managed – especially when an unexpected twist and additional layer of complexity was revealed later in the book. Another welcome moment was the emergence into the open air. Nick Green seems to be particularly good at evoking effects of light on landscape and glistening natural beauty. Not that the post-disaster countryside is uniformly lovely: there are methane flares from pockets of rotting garbage and a glimpse of a survivor spending his (short) life melting down abandoned plastic. One imaginative insight I especially enjoyed was Leo's occasional sense of his 'own' landscape – Salford, Manchester, the M6 motorway – buried a thousand years below the landscape on which he and his friends are struggling to survive.

There's cruelty and loss in this second volume but I feel somehow that it's the most human of the three. That's a descriptive not an evaluative point. The mainly female Blackwater village, the ruthless Dustral raids are small scale in comparison with the brutalities and stark struggles for existence in the final volume Firebird Radiant. That's fine. I think trilogies should work rather like symphonies with themes introduced, developed and brought to some resounding climax. AS such, however there the obvious danger or predictability and one of Nick Green's clevernesses in his third volume is to counterpoint the megalomaniac’s bid for global domination with the intimate domesticities of broken nights and nappy changing.

There are thrilling action sequences, delicate moments of relationship and some extraordinarily fine descriptive writing throughout the trilogy. There's also plenty of intellectual content and much to reflect on and discuss in our management of the natural world. I rather hope that we are sufficiently co-operative to establish a Global Seed bank to preserve crop varieties – currently I hear more about fragmentation and restrictive patenting. These books could be offered to consumers of The Hunger Games or Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses. Instead each volume is available for £1.85 on Kindle. I don't think this is ideological statement: I think this is 21st century publishing's failure.

Return to REVIEWS HOMEPAGE

CRACKS by Caroline Green, reviewed by Cecilia Busby

I thoroughly enjoyed Cracks, although it's not the best of titles for a sentence like that - actually, it's hard to think of a sentence with the title in that wouldn't draw a snigger from several of the teenage protagonists of this book. That aside, it's a rip-roaring adventure that will appeal to many of the readers who devoured The Hunger Games, and reminded me of some of the futuristic thrillers I read as a child by Peter Dickinson, John Christopher, or Robert Westall. Essentially, it's the revolutionary underground against the evil system, but there is scope in that general area for all sorts of interesting things to happen, and Green adds her own inventive take, with some memorable characters and a good deal of exactly the right kind of nail-biting tension and multiplication of layers of plot which need to be uncovered.

In the first part of the book, we meet Cal, who appears to be an average teenage boy, stuck with a rather nasty stepfather and older stepbrother and a mother who's turning a blind eye to the bullying going on in the family. But from the first sentence we are aware that all is not as it seems: Cal sees a crack running across the ceiling of the school toilet which, when he runs and calls for help, has disappeared. More cracks appear and disappear, he hears strange voices, saying things like, "He's waking up. We need to increased the dose", and sudden stoppages or slippages in time. Despite these clues, it's actually quite a shock when Cal "wakes up" and we discover where he really is.

I don't want to give too much away, because one of the joys of this book is that, along with Cal himself, you have to piece together what's going on from little bits of information or disinformation, and often Cal is forced to reassess things he'd previously thought he had nailed. But essentially, from the point he wakes up, Cal is fighting to find and regain his lost identity, as well as to avoid the establishment scientists who took it away in the first place. Along the way he makes contact with some other lost souls, and meets a girl, Kyla.

The future as painted by Green is recognisably extrapolated from our present - more terrorism, more control, more marginalisation of the poor or non-white. It therefore asks teenage readers to think quite hard about the possible end results of the casual racism, anti-immigration and fears of terrorism we are constantly showered with by the current government and press. White teenager Cal, by way of contrast, associates his warmest memories with an Asian family who ran the local shop in his home-town, and the girl he falls for, Kyla, is black - his growing feelings for her are tenderly drawn, as is his friendship with her best mate, also black, Jax.

I read the book in a little under a day, and it was perfect for that fast-paced, can't put it down, plot-driven story that is sometimes just exactly what you want. Green has recently published a sequel to Cracks, which continues the story, but focuses on Kyla, called  Fragments - I will definitely be looking out for that one, too!


Cecilia Busby writes as C.J. Busby, and writes funny, adventure-filled fantasy for readers 7+

Website: www.cjbusby.co.uk
Twitter: @ceciliabusby



Return to REVIEWS HOMEPAGE

AFTER THE SNOW by S.D.Crockett. Reviewed by Pauline Chandler.

Not another dystopia story! Not another tale about a hopeless future, after we’ve destroyed the planet!  Yes, “After the Snow” is set in a harsh future, but don’t miss it:  it’s a deceptively simple adventure story, highly enjoyable as a quest story, which yet highlights deeper issues about types of government, survival skills, trade, barter, money, justice, as well as fundamental human relationships.  

Told in the distinctive voice – part boy, part primitive hunter - of the main character, Willo, the story follows Willo’s quest to find his family, who have been taken away, by harsh government forces. Kidnap and death are commonplace, in this snow-covered world, and Willo is frightened, but, with great courage and resourcefulness, he sets out to find them.  “After the Snow” is really the story of Willo’s coming-of-age on this quest.

Born after ‘the sea stop working and the snow fall and fall and fall’, Willo doesn’t know much about the world ‘Before.’ His skills are making fire, storing food, trapping animals and, especially, in making fur clothes, something which stands him in very good stead on his quest.  I always enjoy scenes where people are working and using their hands to make things, so this part especially appealed to me.

I also loved Willo’s character, his resilience and also his very human doubts, that make him so appealing. Early on in his quest he comes across two abandoned children, who will certainly die without his help. His head tells him that he will have to leave them behind. He doesn’t have enough food to share and they will hold him back on the trail, so he moves on, but his heart makes him go back for them. By this time the younger one is dead and the older one, a girl, has difficulty leaving him. These are harrowing scenes, but the author handles them with fine sensitivity.

There are other scenes in the book, also not for the fainthearted. At one point Willo is thrown into prison, cruelly treated and made to witness an execution, but the emphasis is on Willo’s refusal to give in to tyranny, a strength he needs to fight the regime.

Willo’s father appears only in memories and words in the book. Willo remembers that his dad called him a ‘beacon of hope’. It’s not until the surprising ending to the story that Willo, and the reader, knows why.  

A thought-provoking and exciting story, which gripped me from the start. 

‘After The Snow’ – S.D. Crockett     Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal 2013-09-22

Recommended for able readers aged 10+

Pauline Chandler  

www.paulinechandler.com 

 

Return to REVIEWS HOMEPAGE

Gamerunner by BR Collins - reviewed by Katherine Langrish

Ever since reading her first novel ‘The Traitor Game’, I’ve been quite a fan of B.R. Collins, who writes fast-moving, dark YA thrillers with a twist of horror.  More than any other writer, she reminds me of Ann Halam: and they don’t come much better than that.  She’s inventive, original, and hard-hitting. ‘The Traitor Game’ is a riveting story about an imaginary world shared between two friends – and what happens when trust turns sour.  I was less keen on her second novel, ‘A Trick of the Dark’ – still fantastically atmospheric, but let down by what seemed to me poor characterisation – but I loved her third book, ‘Tyme’s End’, an atmospheric ghost story told in reverse, from present to past. 

So I was excited to see her latest book, ‘Gamerunner’, set in a future world ravaged by climate change and rain so acid it can etch glass.  To live outside in the city of Undone is to risk early death. Young Rick lives a literally sheltered life inside a vast building complex owned by a ruthless corporation called Crater which produces and markets the virtual reality games which are the opiate of the people. Rick’s work – or sport – is to run the Maze, the game developed by his enigmatic mentor Daed, who may or may not be his father.  

At the beginning of the book, Rick is a naïve self-absorbed teenager who doesn’t realise the precariousness of his privileged life.  Daed has promised Crater that the Maze is an endless game which no-one will ever complete. But then it looks as if someone is about to do just that, and Rick is dispatched to stop him. 

It’s a firecracker of a book – B R Collins can do pacy, nail-biting narratives like no-one else.  Careful readers will spot the parallels to the myth of the imprisoned genius Daedalus, who built the Cretan Labyrinth for King Minos, and his son Icarus who flew too near the sun...  Tension rises as Rick disobeys Daed, begins questioning the basis of his protected life, and runs headlong into terrible danger.

The play of love and anger, trust and distrust, obedience and rebellion between Rick and Daed is excellent.  But there are a few strands I should like to have seen more developed.  Near the beginning of the book, Rick steals the identity of an unknown girl, and by doing so, probably destroys her. I wanted to find out more – perhaps to have Rick encounter someone who knew her, a sister or a friend.  Instead, we never discover her fate and she remains a cipher who causes him some guilt but no real distress. And Rick is not a particularly likeable character.  We can pity him but not love him.  He doesn’t grow much through the narrative.  He is disillusioned, but otherwise remains much as he began – inevitably, since he forms no new relationships. I had the feeling that, at some points, the imposed framework of the myth was constricting character development and plot. 

All in all, though, ‘Gamerunner’ is an absorbing and relentless read.  I highly recommend it, and look forward to B R Collins’ next book. 

GAMERUNNER by B.R. COLLINS

Bloomsbury 2011

ISBN 978-1-4088-0648-7

£6.99

Return to REVIEWS HOMEPAGE