Author: Irene Latham
Genre: dystopia
Similar books: Parched by Melanie Crowder
The Last Wild by Piers Torday
Rating:
Summary (provided by publisher): In a future United States, civil war is devastating a country on its last legs. On one side: the Patriots. On the other: President Vex's corrupt government. In the middle: everybody else, just trying to survive. The war is going from bad to worse, but out in the sparsely populated Worselands, twelve-year-old Klynt Tovis doesn't see much of it.
Instead, Klynt spends most of her long summer days bored, or restoring artifacts in her Museum of Fond Memories. Real pet dogs are a thing of the past: after they were found to be carriers of a sickness the government ordered them all killed. But one day an incredible antique shows up at the farm: a D-39 robodog, "Real as a dog can be!" Klynt is overjoyed, but the good luck doesn't last. When the war makes its way into the empty Worselands, she and D-39 find themselves thrown into an epic journey for survival and hope.
Through the twists and turns of this riveting read, Irene Latham deftly shows how kindness can appear in unexpected places during uncertain times.
My opinion: While technically this is a verse novel, in large part it reads as a traditional narrative, just broken up into little chunks of thought. Snapshots, really. The first section is fairly positive, showing us how Klynt and the others live. It's just life as they know it. It takes a fairly sharp turn at the halfway point, becoming more of a survival story. Those early chapters get us engaged. The later chapters give the narrative meaning. It's a bleaker world than we typically see in middle grade fiction but that makes it more compelling. The unique vocabulary is a touch confusing at first but a dedicated reader will quickly make sense of it.
Advanced Reader Copy provided by NetGalley
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