Blood Red Road

This start of a new teen trilogy out today has me itching for the next two…

Blood Red Road
by Moira Young
Doubleday Canada
ISBN: 978 0 385 67183 5
Audience: teens and adults

You know when you start reading a book and you’re plodding along and you’re a little worried that maybe this book is Not Your Thing, really, and it reminds you of some other stuff you’ve read, and you’re hoping it’s not too derivative and you’re just pushing on to see if this gets better? Sometimes, you just keep pushing. Sometimes, you give up. And sometimes, the book suddenly opens up and grabs you so thoroughly, you wish you could swallow it whole in one gulp. This book is that last kind.

It’s dystopian, as so much teen fiction this year is. It’s a quest. It’s written in dialect, which I normally think gets in the way of the story, but works perfectly here as a sort of signpost of how these people have built on the ruins of our world and is also mostly close enough to our talk that it’s not intrusive or hard to read. But still, for all those things that made me hesitate, I can’t stop telling everyone how fantastic this book was.

It starts when one day, a group of Tonton warriors kidnap Saba’s much-beloved twin brother and kill her father, leaving her and her younger sister. She vows to find Lugh, but cares not much for Emmi, who she tries to leave behind with a family friend. Emmi proves herself a tough kid and catches up with her, though, and she is sort of stuck with her for the rest of the book. There are detours on the journey – months of enforced cage match fighting that earn her the title The Angel of Death being the biggest holdup – but Saba is one fierce, determined girl, and she never loses sight of the fact that she must find her brother, especially once she learns that the king is planning to kill him at Midsummer, so she’s got a deadline.

Along the way, she also picks up a few comrades by working together, and their loyalty overcomes her prickliness until she finally relents and accepts help. Saba learns a lot in this book about letting people in, about caring for people (even Emmi), and about loyalty and thanks. This character-building is never preachy, but something the reader wants for her so that she doesn’t lose the things she is gaining, for she will need them in this harsh world, and for all her stubbornness, she really is a character that I was solidly behind. She’s fiesty, single-minded, and strong, sometimes to her detriment, but she is good at her core, and she is pretty unforgettable.

Between the journey over shifting sands, the cage matches, and the kingdom built on drugs and rotten at its core, this book creates an incredible set of visuals, too – you can see it unfold as you read, and once the story gets going, the pace is impressive. This has already been optioned by Ridley Scott, and I can entirely see why. It would play out perfectly on film, just as it is.

As for myself, I only regret that I read it now because it means I need to wait for the next two parts of this planned trilogy. While this does satisfy by stopping at the end of the quest for her brother, I can see lots of directions and reunions left open for Saba’s future, and I can’t wait to make those journeys with her, too.

Also available as an ebook.