Blood Red Road Dustlands (#35)

Thoroughly enjoyed the first book in Moira Young's Dust Lands series, entitled Blood Red Road.  The publishers have pushed it as "better than The Hunger Games..." but I disagree.  I don't think it's even comparable.  Set in a dystopian West, the setting is reminiscent of movies like Mad Max and Waterworld.  The main character, Saba, is similar to Katniss, in that she is responsible for surviving so that her family may be saved.  I was pleasantly surprised by the continuous plot twists, but found myself stumbling over the lack of punctuation.  The author doesn't use any quotation marks to separate dialogue.  I thought I would catch on and it wouldn't be an issue, but I have found that I love quotation marks.  I really do.  LOL


Promise me you won’t, I says.
Won’t what?
Die.
Everybody’s gotta die one day, he says.

Saba's dialect also stuck in my head and was tough to "turn off" once I stopped reading. 

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.  Her father is shot dead by a band of four horseman who kidnap her brother, Lugh.  Emmi, her 9-year-old sister, and Saba set off into an unknown world to rescue Lugh.  They meet up with the roughest scoundrels and find themselves allied with some of the wildest girls they've ever met.  Young does an excellent job writing this novel.  You have empathy with the characters.

There will be a sequel released soon.  If I'm remembering correctly, this is a planned trilogy.

I highly recommend it for middle and high school readers.  However...there are some language issues that I will warn every reader before they pick it up.  These characters live in a rough world.  Their language reveals that all the way through...

Happy Reading!
RC