BLOOD RED ROAD, by Moira Young, Margaret K. McElderry Books,
2011
Women and girls of the future will definitely be strong
willed warriors. Get ready!
18 year old Saba and her twin brother Lugh live in
Silverlake, arid wasteland visited far too often by dust storms. One of those
dust storms deposits a sinister band of villains that kidnaps Lugh and sets
Saba and her younger sister, 9 year old Emmi, off on a quest that will keep
readers postponing whatever it was they planned to do.
The outside world is ugly, lawless, and filled with
unscrupulous and greedy me-first characters. The good news is that there are well-intentioned
courageous people, too. Saba, who has always had Lugh to guide her, is
relentless in her drive to rescue her twin, but along the way she must learn
how to trust others and work as part of a team.
Isolated from “real world” most
of her life, Saba’s manners (what manners?) need work and it isn’t always easy
to follow the dialogue which is written without quotation marks. Who cares
about speech credits anyhow when Saba and her companions are busy aiming
lighted torches at eyeholes and avoiding the claws of hellwurms? We’ll figure
out who said what later. The 459 pages fly by, thanks to the division into
short, spare blocks of text. It’s as if the divisions are there to help the
reader remember to breathe.
Nancy Farmer, a favorite writer of mine, (A Girl Named
Disaster, The House of the Scorpion, and many others) is quoted on the cover,
“The pace never lets up. No situation is so bad that it can’t get worse in the
next couple of pages.” See if you don’t agree with us.
Saba and Emmi grow from self-centeredness to solid responsibility that is both gritty and bitter-sweet. Other developing characters help move this story forward and show
potential to set off on new adventures, perhaps with Saba, perhaps not.
Billed as “Dustlands, Book One,” this debut novel is
evidently the first of several to come. I won’t be the only reader eager to
find out, “what happens next?”
