Moira Young
460 pg., PulseIt eBook
Margaret K. McElderry
4/5 Stars
This book was a great journey for the characters. The main character is Saba, and her brother Lugh has been kidnapped after her village is ransacked by a gang. Saba decides to find Lugh, but is annoyingly accompanied by her small sister, Emmi. Along the way she is brought into the world of cage-fighting, the Free Hawks, and an intense battle between the young and the old.
Saba has always admired her Lugh and has always grudged Emmi, thinking it was her fault for the death of her mother, which occurred after giving birth to Emmi. But Saba and Emmi's relationship develops beautifully throughout the course of this novel. There's this nice moment where Emmi asks Saba if she could give her a piggyback ride. Saba thinks of denying, mostly because she's not one to play around, but she decides to oblige.
Saba befriends fellow cage-fighters, the Free Hawks. She also makes friends with Jack, Tommo, and Ike. The former of those three becomes a romantic interest for Saba, and they kiss multiple times throughout this novel. That was one thing that was disappointing about this novel; I was really hoping that there wouldn't be romance, unfortunately there was. It wasn't incredibly sappy, but Saba does describe the feeling, and I didn't really need it. If I wanted to know how it felt for the heroine to be kissed, I would just go read Twilight.
Saba's dialect is very unique. This book is a dystopian, but it feels very old-Western. Saba speaks with a twang and pronounces words like "and" as "an" and contracts a lot of words, like saying "more than", which becomes "more'n". This was very interesting to read.
There was a point in the book where it was going quite slow, which was around the middle, but then it definitely picked up again at the end and finished off nicely and with a bit of closure.
This is part of the Dustlands series, and the sequel should be released around May or June of next year.
No comments:
Post a Comment