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Blood Red Road

by Moira Young

First-time novelist Moira Young has hit paydirt with Blood Red Road. The B.C. author’s dystopian/post-apocalyptic YA novel is the first in a trilogy that has already been optioned for film by director Ridley Scott. It’s poised to be the next big thing in teen fiction, and with good reason.

Eighteen-year-old Saba is on a quest to save her beloved twin brother, Lugh, from a cruel and oppressive drug lord, a ruler who styles himself after Louis XIV. She’s shadowed by her pesky younger sister, Emmi, and her smart-as-a-whip pet crow, Nero. Along the way, she is captured and forced to fight for her life as “The Angel of Death” in allgirl cage matches. With the help of a band of canny fighters, she escapes and continues on her journey to find Lugh.

The story, told in Saba’s voice, is full of quirky, folksy dialect that smacks of the Old West, with all its “yers” and “ain’ts.”  Sentences are short, oddly punctuated, and devoid of quotation marks, but within a few pages the rhythm of the prose becomes familiar and even pleasing.

Saba is a powerful female character, flawed but likeable. She grows and changes throughout the story in a believable way. The world she lives in is beautifully wrought, as well as terrifyingly plausible. The plot is full of non-stop action.

The weakest link in the story is the hackneyed romantic subplot. It’s easy to picture Jack, the object of Saba’s desire, on the cover of a Harlequin, with his flashing silver-grey eyes and crooked, cocky smile. Their relationship follows a predictable pattern of spurn and lust, spurn and lust, and most readers will find it tedious.

Truth be told, the magic of Blood Red Road is not that it is particularly original. Instead, Young has taken familiar pieces of everything from Gladiator to Lord of the Rings and put them in the hands of a spunky, moody heroine who breaths new life into old motifs.

 

Reviewer: Kate Watson

Publisher: Doubleday Canada

DETAILS

Price: $19.95

Page Count: 464 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-0-38567-183-5

Released: June

Issue Date: 2011-6

Categories: Children and YA Fiction

Age Range: 14+