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Summary
Summary
Saba has spent her whole life in Silverlake, a dried-up wasteland ravaged by constant sandstorms. The Wrecker civilization has long been destroyed, leaving only landfills for Saba and her family to scavenge from. That's fine by her, as long as her beloved twin brother Lugh is around. But when a monster sandstorm arrives, along with four cloaked horsemen, Saba's world is shattered. Lugh is captured, and Saba embarks on an epic quest to get him back.
Suddenly thrown into the lawless, ugly reality of the world outside of desolate Silverlake, Saba is lost without Lugh to guide her. So perhaps the most surprising thing of all is what Saba learns about herself: she's a fierce fighter, an unbeatable survivor, and a cunning opponent. And she has the power to take down a corrupt society from the inside. Teamed up with a handsome daredevil named Jack and a gang of girl revolutionaries called the Free Hawks, Saba stages a showdown that will change the course of her own civilization.
Blood Red Road has a searing pace, a poetically minimal writing style, violent action, and an epic love story. Moira Young is one of the most promising and startling new voices in teen fiction.
Author Notes
Moira Young is the author of the Dust Lands series. The first book, Blood Red Road , won the Costa Children's Book Award, was a Cybils Award Winner for fantasy and science fiction, and was a Best Fiction for Young Adults selection. The Dust Lands continues with Rebel Heart , which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly , and Raging Star . A native Canadian, Moira lives with her husband in the UK. Learn more at MoiraYoung.com.
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Young's powerful debut, first in the Dustlands series, is elevated above its now familiar postapocalyptic setting by an intriguing prose style and strong narrative voice that show a distinct Cormac McCarthy vibe. When 18-year-old Saba's father is killed and her twin brother, Lugh, is kidnapped, she sets out to rescue him, along with their younger sister, Emmi, and Saba's intelligent raven, Nero. Their travels across the desert wasteland bring them to a violent city in which Saba is forced to fight for her life in an arena. When she escapes with the help of a group of women warriors, she and her new allies (including a handsome and infuriating male warrior named Jack) try to prevent Lugh from being sacrificed. Young's writing style-channeled through Saba's wonderfully defined narrative voice-may be off-putting at first, but readers will quickly get used to the lack of quotation marks and idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation ("There ain't nuthin written in the stars. They're jest lights in the sky") and be riveted by the book's fast-paced mix of action and romance. It's a natural for Hunger Games fans. Ages 14-up. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
After her twin brother is captured, Saba vows to rescue him. Accompanied by her despised younger sister, she travels through the dystopian land of lawless enclaves and disintegrating civilization. Saba's skill as a fighter serves both to preserve her family and to help make allies. The cruelty of Young's world is balanced by Saba's development from sullen loner into loyal heroine. (c) Copyright 2011. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
This postapocalyptic opener to the Dustlands series looks like a doorstop but reads with the fleetness of a book half its length, In part, this is due to the terse narration of 18-year-old Saba, whose single-minded determination to find her kidnapped twin brother, Lugh, takes her far out into a blasted wasteland. With her annoying kid sister in tow, Saba gets captured and is forced to fight in cage matches for the pleasure of the maniacal king Vicar Pinch (who styles himself after an ancient portrait of Louis XIV) and the populace he keeps in his thrall thanks to copious amounts of the chewable drug chaal. Saba can be a tough heroine to root for, sullen and ungrateful to those who try to help her, but fans of the Hunger Games' Katniss will find in her similar reserves of hidden good nature and ferocious fighting abilities. Some of the haphazard plot logic is hard to swallow, but Young has leveraged an intriguing action-romance story into a Mad Max-style world that'll leave readers both satisfied and eager for more.--Chipman, Ia. Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HOW many times can the world come to an end? For Saba, the fatalistic 18-year-old heroine of "Blood Red Road," quite a few. She lives long after Earth's last major civilization, the Wreckers, went extinct. Her mother died nine years earlier, giving birth to Saba's sister, Emmi. The lake beside her family's shack is drying up, replaced by a wasteland of dust storms and heat. It soon gets worse: Saba's father is shot dead by a band of four horsemen. (If they arrived to ring in the apocalypse, they're too late; this place has been in ruins for as long as anyone can remember.) They gallop off with the one thing that still matters to Saba: her twin brother, Lugh, her "golden heart." "Blood Red Road" is the opening installment in a planned trilogy by the first-time novelist Moira Young, and it sets the stage for a classic hero's journey. Saba has to get Lugh back. She also must look after Emmi, whom she dislikes and blames for her mother's death. "A ugly little red scrap with a heartbeat like a whisper," as Saba sees it. "By rights, she shouldn't of lasted longer 'n a day or two." Neither sister has ever left home before. Now they've reached the threshold where, in the words of the mythologist Joseph Campbell, heroes embark on "a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown." The world they enter is cruel and unpredictable. Well, maybe not entirely unpredictable. "Blood Red Road" traipses through many of dystopia's greatest hits. A young woman's sibling is threatened; driven by protectiveness and love, she battles her way through a postapocalyptic world, becoming a formidable fighter. When characters speak, their words are not set in quotation marks, an absence that's a signature of Cormac McCarthy novels like the "The Road": Promise me you won't, I says. Won't what? Die. Everybody's gotta the one day, he says. There's a dash of "Mad Max," too, when Saba is trapped in Hopetown, an anarchic, dusty outpost where the bread and circus of choice is cage fighting. (Is it any surprise that Ridley Scott swiftly optioned the book?) The local despot, however, isn't Tina Turner; he's a creepy king who draws his power from drugs, mind control and the occasional human sacrifice. These are just a few of the many plot engines clamoring for attention. There's also romance with Jack, a rakish cage-fighter; adventures with a band of female warriors called the Free Hawks; a system of religious magic based on the moon and stars; and hellwurms, a breed of nasty monsters that burst from the desert sand with neither mercy nor context. The problem isn't that some of these plot devices are familiar. It's that there are so many of them. Even in 450-odd pages, the subthemes can't all be developed. Some are introduced and later abandoned, possibly to be rescued in the next volume. Others hang around, crowding the book. All this clutter seems incongruous with what makes the story truly sing: Young's spare depictions of the struggle to survive and find companionship in a barren world that hardens hearts and minds. Apart from her bond with Lugh, Saba is a loner who trusts no one. Sometimes that attitude keeps her alive. More often, it pushes people away. Much of Young's writing has an elemental power, unfolding across achingly barren landscapes, full of blistering "hotwinds" and swirling clouds of orange dust. Scenes are brief, told in a few pages with fast-paced action. And the sentences are economical, dry and tight. The words themselves are distinct too. Nearly all of Young's characters are illiterate. Saba narrates her story in frayed English, full of phonetic spellings and other quirks. It's as if spoken language has degraded through a game of telephone that has dragged on for centuries or been cobbled together from whatever scraps survived the apocalypse, the same way Saba's family built a shack from scavenged tires and other "Wrecker junk." The dialect takes getting used to, but the payoff is a musical brokenness to the language, which creaks along nicely with Saba's observations of her torn-up surroundings. "We ride into the dead city jest as the sun's startin to rise up," Saba drawls upon entering a Wrecker settlement. "The rusted iron skellentons of skyscrapers, the ones that we seen in the distance, line both sides of the road." Hers is an ugly inheritance. Like millennial teenagers, Saba knows that epic problems - economic, environmental, social - are handed down from one generation to the next. No one gets a fresh start. In Saba's world, we're ghosts from another civilization; the readers are Wreckers. And the death of this city - our city - is a mystery. "Could of bin plague or hunger or thirst or wars. Or maybe all of 'em at once," she marvels. "The Wreckers did it all." Undid it all is more like it, which raises the question: What will Saba do or undo after she and her brother are reunited? There's no way she can forget everything she's learned about her broken planet. When Jack urges her to team up with the Free Hawks, he may be giving us a glimpse of the future. "They wanna do somethin," he says. "Maybe help make the world a better place. C'mon, Saba, what's yer problem with that?" Jessica Bruder teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is the author of "Burning Book."
School Library Journal Review
Grade 7 Up-In the first gripping title (Margaret K. McElderry Bks., 2011) of Moira Young's post-apocalyptic trilogy, 18-year-old Saba ventures into the harsh and unforgiving world outside of her isolated home after masked horsemen kill her father and kidnap her twin brother. Determined to find him, Saba sets out for Hopetown, only to be followed by her younger sister. They are unprepared for the danger and treachery they encounter. Captured and forced to fight in gladiator-style cage fights for the entertainment of the Hopetown residents, Saba never loses her single-minded focus on surviving to find her brother. But her actions could have far-reaching consequences for her civilization. Listeners are treated to an impressive performance by Heather Lind, whose believably youthful voice resonates as the hard, resolute protagonist. The first person present tense narration heightens the intensity and immediacy of the action, as well as Saba's raw emotions. Lind also gives supporting characters unique voices, and turns in a fine performance of the dialect written by the author. A perfect choice for fans of Suzanne Collins's "The Hunger Games" trilogy, and a good fit for listeners who enjoyed Kristin Cashore's Graceling and Patrick Ness's "Chaos Walking" trilogy.-Amanda Raklovits, Champaign Public Library, IL (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Born on Midwinter Day, Saba and her twin brother Lugh are oppositesshe's dark, scrawny and cantankerous, while he exudes calm with his golden beautybut that doesn't stop her from rising to the occasion when he needs her.Weeks before their 18th birthday, four rough horsemen ride into their isolated, desert homestead, killing their star-reading Pa and taking Lugh captive. Saba embarks on a treacherous journey to save Lugh, with her pet crow, Nero, and her 9-year-old sister, Emmi, in tow. Saba and Emmi are kidnapped by slavers, who sell Saba to the Cage Master of the Colosseum, where she becomes known as the Angel of Death. Overseeing this macabre world is a king who keeps people in check with a narcotic, convincing them to renew his life by sacrificing a boy born on Midwinter Day. Saba learns about Lugh's fate from Jack, a fellow prisoner. With the help of Nero and a group of freedom fighters, Jack and Saba escape and rush to Lugh's rescue. This debut is a mashup of Spartacus, the court of Louis XIV and post-apocalyptic dystopia. Saba's naive, uneducated voice narrates this well-paced heroic quest in dialect, an effective device for this tale that combines a love story, monsters and sibling rivalry.Readers looking for a strong female protagonist will find much to look forward to in this new series. (Science fiction. 12 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Young's coming-of-age, young adult action/romance first novel is set in post-apocalyptic times. When her father is murdered and her twin brother is kidnapped, sheltered 18-year-old Saba is suddenly thrown into a violent world inhabited by brutal people, giant wormlike monsters, female warriors, superstition, and a vicious king. The text is written in ungrammatical English that can be very hard on the ear, especially when reader Heather Lind annoyingly barks, "I says," "she says," "he says," after each character's dialog. Recommended for Mad Max and Hunger Games fans who do not mind listening to fractured English. This text might be easier to read than to hear.-Ilka Gordon, Siegal Coll. of Judaic Studies Lib., -Cleveland (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.