Glenda Millard

A dystopian novel, a complex and haunting exploration of life on the edge and what it takes to triumph over adversity. A story about the indomitable nature of hope and relationships.
Two young boys, an old tramp, a beautiful teenage dancer, named Tia, and her baby, they are survivors of a sudden war. They form a fragile family, hiding out in the ruins of an amusement park. As they scavenge for food, diapers, and baby formula, they must stay out of sight of vicious gangs and lawless solders. At first they rely on Billy, the only adult in the group. But as civil life deteriorates, Billy starts to fall apart. Skip, who is barely into his teens, must take over and lead them on a search for sanctuary. A sad story of the lengths a person will go to to survive, I felt especially sad for Tia who had to make mind damaging decisions to survive. I felt that there were many ways to interpret the story dependent on your own life experiences. I would read this book again… (mais)

Real Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: i am the girl manny loves. the girl who writes our story in the book of flying. i am alice.

Alice is fifteen, with hair as red as fire and skin as pale as bone. Something inside Alice is broken: she remembers words, but struggles to speak them. Still, Alice knows that words are for sharing, so she pins them to posters in tucked-away places: railway waiting rooms, fish-and-chips shops, quiet corners. Manny is sixteen, with a scar from shoulder to elbow. Something inside Manny is broken, too: he once was a child soldier, forced to do terrible, violent things. But in a new land with people who care for him, Manny explores the small town on foot. And in his pocket, he carries a poem he scooped up, a poem whose words he knows by heart. The relationship between Alice and Manny will be the beginning of love and healing. And for these two young souls, perhaps, that will be good enough.

Beautiful, lyrical prose, told in two voices, lifts up a poignant story of two traumatized teens who find each other in a small riverside town.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: The end of 2015 was a time that I, personally, was healing from some awful emotional and psychic wounds. At that moment, I wasn't really up to reading adult-level books. I thought that, since they're aimed at people of (say) twelve or thirteen, YA books would be about perfect for me. Not too rough, not too simplistic.

You idiot, I want to find my younger, more naïve self and shout at him.

This is a charming story of young love, of the viperous depredations of haters inculcated in a sense of their own superiority and imperviousness to blame, of the astounding prices we exact from those too weak to resist. They're all done up in ribbons of florid language in this book, and the use of typographical tomfoolery...Alice's narration is without capitals, while Manny's is in a blocky sans-serif type and in very English-as-a-second-language words...is pervasive. In fact it sort of defines the ethos and the aesthetic of the story. Which explains the missing stars.

Yes, it will appeal to the target audience. No, it did nothing but detract from the touching story being told. The stars stay gone.

Small-town stardom and the general veneration in US culture for sports stars at all levels is under very effective attack in this story. Manny is a child soldier being gentled into mainstream society by some very good souls. His father figure, Bull, is a former high-school sports phenom. It's natural that Manny would map his own efforts onto Bull's pattern. That he is good at it is the source of his worst, most believable crisis.

Alice is, it's fair to say, a social outcast from a family of them. She's neurodivergent, she's a poet, she's all sorts of things people feel skittish about. She has Bear, a medical-assistance dog, which frankly was something I'd been largely unaware of the existence of for people like Alice. So it was natural and inescapable that their outsiderness calls each to the other. There really is no way to argue that it would ever be otherwise, either in reality or in fiction. Alice's father is in prison, her mother ran the hell away from the troubles, and her brother Joey has designs on a girl above his station. That girl's brother, the sports star, decides he'll make absolutely sure he drives a spike into these designs and uses Manny and Alice as his sledgehammer.

Stuff gets ugly. Stuff happens that inevitably will happen in every life. And all of it in the silly-buggers typography that caused me, too many times to count, to go back and forth and back and forth to figure out if we're still in the same sentence because NO CAPS = NO BREAKS!

Well, anyway, that's the old man speaking. And you'll notice that I finished the book, so the story obviously offered me something I wanted enough to keep laboriously decoding the damn thing.

That it did. Alice and Manny. Joey and Tilda. Bull and Louisa. People doing more than the minimum, for no reason other than it's the right thing to do. People reaching into each other's dark places and standing with the whole person not just the pretty, easy bits.

It's a well-made story that takes us on a realistic enough journey through a culture in the throes of challenge and change. So much for a simple, easy-to-process little story, eh what?… (mais)