Currently Loving:
Gone and Hunger by Michael GrantThe phone rang, and Michael Grant reached over to answer the inevitable call he'd been waiting for since that morning.
"Michael!" The publisher's voice boomed through the
receiver. "It's time for an update! What have you got for us?"
"Well..." Michael picked up and Biro and began
twirling it restlessly, glancing nervously at the bookshelves. "I had this... one idea.."
"Go on!" Once again, Michael held the phone away from his ear in response to the bellow coming from his publisher's throat that was probably setting off earthquakes in Japan.
"Uh, okay. Well, what if I have a load of child characters, all under the age of fifteen, say, and all the adults in their world suddenly disappear and they're forced to fend for themselves?"
"You have read
Lord of the Flies, right?"
"Um...?"
"Next!" Michael began speaking before he'd brought the phone back to his mouth and had to repeat the first sentence. "Well, next I thought- I said next I thought of people suddenly discovering these weird weird powers, like supermen, without any
explanation.
There'd be Healers and people who can run super fast and shoot fire-"
"Have you been keeping up with
Heroes? I hear they're showing it across the pond now."
"Yeah, but these would be kids-" Michael was cut off by a cough.
"
Xmen."
"Well... wait! Wait!" Michael grasped his desk, an
amazing, inexplicable and frankly brilliant idea forming in his mind. "What about all those things...
together?"
A silence.
"I like it!"
Okay, so the entire conversation above is fictional (and far too dialogue heavy, I apologise) but you get the
jist. The fact that this book has elements from other books, films and television is blown away by the sheer awesome (I use that and actually mean
Awe-some. Not just my usual slang, ladies and gentlemen, no way!) quality of these books. Forget all your Wolverines and Peter
Patrellis, there's a new hero in town now. Sam Temple is a quiet and reserved surfer going to school in small town
Perdido Beach. Then, in the middle of third period history class, his teacher poofs. No. Not poofs.
"One minute, the teacher was talking about the Civil War.
And the next he was gone.
There.
Gone.
No "poof". No flash of light. No explosion."
At first dumbstruck, the full horror of Sam and his friend's predicament soon overwhelms them. Every single person over the age of fifteen has disappeared. No parents, no siblings, no teachers. Great, eh?
Maybe not. No police. No doctors. No pizza delivery guys. The children of Perdido Beach find themselves alone, leaderless, and hemmed in by a strange barrier that burns to the touch. All they have is the town, a small segment of sea and surrounding hills, including a nuclear plant, a hotel, a large portion of forest... and a boarding school; Coates Academy.
Now the book sounds a little less shallow, but just think about these ten things before you write it off as your usual teen flick:
1) The babies and toddlers are still there. Who is going to sacrifice their time to look after all them?
2) Food's going to run out soon, but who has the balls to tell people what to do, what to eat and when?
3)People are beginning to get hurt, who's going to look after them?
4)Cars, guns, drugs, smokes, they're all now available to anyone man enough to claim them.
5) Not everyone likes everyone else. Bullies are ruling the streets. Are kids capable of murder?
6) What are the Coates kids doing up on the hill?
7) Why are some kids noticing strange differences about themselves? "I'm sure I couldn't fly before the FAYZ..." (that's the Fallout Alley Youth Zone; a universal name for the goldfish bowl everyone's found themselves trapped in (and no, that's not a quote from the book))
8) A talking coyote? A flying snake? How come that book just walked away?
9) Kids always quarrel, right? Well now they have guns, powers and desperation. Who's going to sort out the fights?
10) What's that voice...?
