Teaser Tuesday + Review: Blood Red Road by Moira Young

    
     If you seen me an Lugh together, you'd never think we was the same blood. Never think we grew together in the same womb.
     He's got gold hair. I got black.
     Blue eyes. Brown eyes. Strong. Scrawny.
     Beautiful. Ugly. He's my light.
     I'm his shadow.
     Lugh shines like the sun.
     That must of made it easy fer them to find him. All they had to do was follow his light.

From the Back Cover:

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.

My Thoughts:

The first fifty pages of this book are the best I've read in a long, long time. This is simple storytelling at its best. Young masterfully pulls the reader into her story world with a minimalistic style: no unnecessary words, no unnecessary punctuation, (i.e. quotation marks), no distractions. Young shows everything, tells nothing, and lets the reader draw her own conclusions. Short scenes, page breaks in all the right places, and every page propels the reader forward, utterly engrossed in the story. I blew through this 500-page book in two days.

The story follows Saba as she tracks her brother's kidnappers through a barren world littered with the ruins of the Wrecker civilization. (We're never actually told who the Wreckers are, but it's implied that the Wreckers were the people who ruined the earth and turned her into the dustland she is now.) Saba's never left her homestead before now, and though she fights like a devil, she's unprepared for the world she finds beyond her home. A violent, low-life, hardscrabble population hooked on Chaal, a drug produced by the government. An insane king who controls the fearsome ninja-like guards who police the population. And the Cagemaster, the second most powerful man in the land, who controls the nation's favorite pasttime: cage fights. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I'll end the plot description here. Just know that Saba's intense, the story's intense, and Young holds no punches. And despite the violence and strife, this story is heavy on themes of family, friendship, and girl-power.

The only thing holding this back from five stars for me is the ending. This is the first in a trilogy, so I wasn't expecting a full resolution; however, I was expecting a really strong finish to match the rest of the book. But the very last scene ended up being a bit wishy-washy for me, a little vague and uninspired, when I really needed this book to end strong and give me a hint of what's to come. That bumped it down a notch for me, but I'm picky, and plenty of others have no problem with it. I will definitely read the next book. There are a couple of mysteries yet to be explained and there's something that just seems a little off with Saba's boy Jack. If you're into post-apocalyptic fiction, or if you're just a fan of exceptionally well-written books, you don't want to miss this one!

My Rating:  4.5 Stars out of 5

*Please note: This title will be published June 7, 2011, and this review references an advance digital copy received from the publisher, and therefore the final published copy may differ. Though I received this book from the publisher, these are my honest and unbiased thoughts, and I was not compensated in any other way for reviewing this book.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:


Grab your current read

Open to a random page
Share two "teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! Share the title & author, too, so that others can add the book to their TBR Lists!

So, you may have seen some of the hype surrounding this book; Ridley Scott has already obtained the film rights, pre-publication! I've gone over the teaser line limit this week, but it's a simple teaser, and I loved it, and I really wanted to share it. If you like it, scroll down to read my review. This is from the first page of this killer-good book: