Would I Be Better Off If I Know? Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch

It's funny how things get stuck in your head. Like the woman who gave me this notebook.She wasn't National Guard or CDC. The October Sixteenth Fund, maybe, or Remember Black River. The Remember People. All this woman had was notebooks.

"We though some of you might want one," she said. "So you can record things about yourself or your family, or what's happened since the quarantine. That way if you get, you know, infected, it could be like your memory."

Memory is Cardinal Cassidy's problem. When a strange illness hits the town of Black River Falls, the unknown virus wipes the memory of each infected person clean. They can remember some things--common knowledge like colors, numbers, song lyrics, how to read, but their personal identities, their families, their friends' names, the relationships they formed, all those are gone.  But Card is not infected and it seems he is alone in remembering everything. Seeking out his old house, Card finds it abandoned.

The National Guard rushes in to seal off the town to prevent spread of the virus to the rest of the country, and the government and private agencies provide supplies to support the infected, and slowly they begin to organize themselves into ad hoc arrangements. Strangers form couples, some take up life in abandoned houses, and children are sent to sometimes dangerous shelters where people, freed of old controls, prey upon them. Everything has changed. Overwhelmed by memories, Card meets up with his mother in the town.

It was Mom.

"Kid? Are you all right? You don't look all right."

"I'm fine," I said. I sat up slowly. My mask was beside me, but something stopped me from putting it on.

I'd spent three days after the outbreak searching for her. but this was the first time I'd actually seen her since that night. She was thinner, and her skin was deeper brown, as if she'd been spending a lot of time outside. I saw her wedding ring was gone.

"Well, if you're sure you're okay..." she said, turning away.

"My name's Cardinal, Cardinal Cassidy," I said.

"Nice to meet you.Cardinal, but I'd better get going." she said.

I called out to her again, but if she heard me, she didn't turn around.

Somehow Card had hoped that his mom might somehow know him, but he sees that to her he is just another stranger. Painfully, Card's memory of his family and town is intact. He remembers what the others do not, and one thing he remembers from that last day is a family quarrel in which his father had killed his brother, Cameron. Wearing a protective mask and gloves against the virus and driven by his memories and the chaos in the town, Card flees to a makeshift camp alone near the top of a local mountain, Lucy's Promise, and is gradually drawn into an impromptu "family" of children and young teenagers, shepherded by eighteen year-old Greer. Card remembers Greer as the cruel bully at the local high school, but sheared of all memory of his past identity, Greer is a different person and becomes Card's friend. Card is also drawn to a girl he rescues who chooses to be called Hannah,

Then the protective National Guard is suddenly withdrawn, replaced by a subcontractor, Martinson Vine, the "Marvins," clad in black riot gear, masks, and heavily armed, who begin a forced roundup, loading the infected into transport trucks to re-settle them in "safe" places. Greer and Hannah refuse to be taken, hoping to keep their close group of kids together, but Greer is killed in the struggle, and Hannah chooses to stay with the others. In despair, Card feels hopelessly alone and isolated from all those he has come to care about. Being uninfected seems the worst of the bad choices facing him. In a moment of reckless wishing to forget, he removes his mask and kisses Hannah.

But Card is immune to the virus, has been all along, and instead of forgetting, his memories are still there to taunt him with all that has been lost.

Sometimes it seems that all the good things and all the bad things are like vines growing up the side of a house. They are so many of them and they're all so tangled that it's impossible to tell one from the other. It's easy to think you have been saved when really you've been doomed all along.

Card comes close to suicide but is drawn back by the hope that his immunity may provide clues to helping the infected recover their memories, but as his mother confesses when next they meet...

"Would I be better off if I know?"

Jeff Hirsch's forthcoming psychological survival story, Black River Falls (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), deals with more than survival after a strange epidemic. At its core this novel deals with the source of personal identity, hidden deep in the ying-yang of nature vs. nurture, innate personality or those memories that shape a child into the person he or she becomes, the question of where we exist, within our in-born selves or inside our roles in social milieu in which we live.

Cardinal's uniqueness as a character lies at that choice point which few of us have as consciously as he. But growing to maturity is actually something like that, a kind of choosing what to keep from the past and what new life to pick to live, making this gripping internal coming-of-age story something of an outlier among the many dystopian science fiction novels out there. Although fans of super-hero comic sagas may be caught up in the complex parallel flashbacks to Card's father's graphic novel series, the Brotherhood of Wings, some readers may find they reinforce the theme that the outer world is something we create; others may merely see them as a dream-sequence metaphor to the otherwise fast-paced story. For the young adult reader, there is a lot to ponder in this novel of individual identity and community.

Trust No One: Independent Study by Joelle Charbonneau

"It's such a waste. He could have been one of the stars of this class. There should be another way."

"Procedures are in place for a reason, MayLin."

My heart leaps into my throat. That voice belongs to Dr. Jedidiah Barnes. "The country can't afford to change course now. Not when we are finally beginning to make progress. You know what to do with him."

I peer around the corner of the building and my knees give way as I see two officials carrying Obadiah toward the skimmer. His head lolls back. His braids drag the ground. I look for the rise and fall of his chest, but there is none.

The female official who escorted Obadiah appears with a black bag and Obadiah's guitar. She throws them into the skimmer and it lifts off the ground and travels across the barren landscape.

Obadiah is gone. Redirected. Dead. If I am not careful, I will be, too.

Valencia Vale has survived her examinations and the life-or-death Testing in the unrevitalized lands, but as she and the other survivors of the Induction Ceremony prepare to begin their graduate studies in their assigned field, her fears lead her to follow one of the students who has failed, one who is said to be "redirected," presumably sent to one of the colonies to work. From a hidden vantage she discovers in horror that redirection means execution, that any failure on her part can mean, not being sent home to her Five Lake Colony to work with her father in botanical science, but a quick, anonymous death. Failed students are clearly disposable for the Commonwealth.

And as she begins her assignment to governmental studies, Cia realizes that students from the capital, sons and daughters of officials in Tosu City, are not redirected, and she realizes that the odds are against her and other colony students. Assigned nine courses for the first semester, Cia knows that she must excel just to survive.

And then she learns that there is a covert faction, working to overthrow the current government and return the Commonwealth to its mission of justice and redevelopment following the apocalypse that destroyed the United States and most of the world. When Cia receives one of the twelve coveted internships, working under the President of the Commonwealth herself, and is contacted by her brother Zeen, now one of the leaders of the rebels, he tells her that the president is planning to confront the other officials of the Commonwealth with the murder and injustice they use to keep the Tosu City faction in power, and if that initiative fails, a full-scale insurrection will begin.

Cia's father told her to "trust no one," and now she realizes that her fellow students, even Tomas, the one she loves, are capable of conspiring against her to help themselves, and Cia determines that she must escape from the city and join the resistance. But being a rebel means willfully choosing to kill. As she prepares to cross the bridge leading from her residence, Cia thinks about her bleak choices.

I close my eyes and see Rawson, Zandri, Malachi. My Testing roommate Ryme. Other faces I have no names for haunt my sleep. How many have killed without hesitation? How can I face my fellow students each day wondering what horrors they are capable of.

I grip the steel railing and let the chill of the metal fill me. How easy it would be to let the emptiness swallow me. To find release at the bottom. To be welcomed by those I have lost.

But I don't. I take my hand from the rail and step back. This is one choice I will never make.

I look at the University campus--a place built on hope and a promise that those who study here will make this world better. A promise I believe in and will find the strength and courage to fight for. I will do what it takes.

But Cia understands that choosing not to end her own life means that she will be asked to kill others if the insurrection begins. But there is one hope--that she can find physical proof of the cruel deaths officials have arranged for The Testing, evidence strong enough to persuade the Council to return the Commonwealth to justice without overthrow by force.

Joelle Charbonneau's second book in her series, Independent Study (The Testing) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) deals with the struggle for justice in a dystopian society in a devastated world. Unlike many other such novels, including the current Hunger Games series, Cia's struggle is primarily intellectual. Although there are plenty of life-and-death encounters, reaching justice in The Testing series requires more than strength and fighting skill. Intelligence and an ethical compass are the powers which author Charbonneau highlights, and she mostly succeeds in creating believable young characters, removing the layers of the personality to reveal the weaknesses and strengths of the human heart. There are plenty of dangerous trials and cliffhanging episodes to keep young adult science fiction action fans absorbed throughout the narrative, but Cia's choice of which side to join and which others to trust provides a theme that is both current and eternal.

My review of the first book in this series, The Testing can be read here, and Joelle Charbonneau's trilogy will conclude with Graduation Day (The Testing),forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in June of 2014.

On the Dark Side: The Shade of the Moon by Susan Beth Pfeffer

"They used their belts for a noose," Mrs. Brunswick said. "They told Laura to say her prayers... Then they used her for target practice."

Mrs. Brunswick was sobbing. "They said they'd kill our children if she wasn't still there when they came back. I'm so sorry, Jon....  There's a back door," she said, "...it might be easier for you."

But when he left the school office Jon went out the front door. They wanted people to see Mom. They wanted people to understand what they were capable of doing.

Jon stood still beside his mother's body. He wanted to take her home, back to Pennsylvania, back to life as it had been. He wanted Mom to see the sun again, to see the grandchild she'd been so eagerly awaiting. He wanted to kill.

Four years have passed since a meteor strike on the moon changed life on earth. Billions have died from the earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and ashen clouds that blocked most of the sun's light. The earth is vastly changed, but human nature, freed from the social conventions so laboriously worked out over millennia of human life, sadly has not. A much different United States endures, but limited to an oligarchy of enclaves of the privileged,the clavers, surrounded by subject workers, grubs, who provide the manual labor to sustain these small communities.

Jon is living with his stepmother Lisa and his little half-brother inside an enclave in Tennessee called Sexton, while his mother Laura lives with his sister Miranda and her husband Alex, living in the nearby grub town of White Birch. Jon is a "slip," admitted by a suspect pass to the better-fed claver community, with the help of Lisa's administrative position and his place as a star soccer player on Sexton's high school team. Even sport is seen as a way to humiliate grubs and keep them in a subordinate position, and Jon's coach demands that they overwhelm the grub teams they play to keep them in their place. When Jon meets the newly arrived Sarah, a transfer with her doctor father from another enclave, his teammates force him to choose between them and her, and aware of his tentative position within the enclave, he reluctantly sides with them. Still Sarah and Jon contrive ways to meet secretly and form a bond of closeness that reflects their inner disapproval of the social inequity of their position.

When the grubber White Birch team seems to be winning their match, a riot begins in the stands which spreads throughout the town as a grub revolt, brutally subdued after several days by the clavers' overwhelming force. Jon's mother is cruelly murdered trying to reach the school where she teaches, and when Jon discovers that his sister's baby has been stolen, under a pretense that it was born deformed and died soon after birth, Sarah comes up with a tenuous plan to take the baby from its adoptive parents and flee Sexton for a refuge with Jon's brother Matt, several hundred miles away. Jon has to make a moral choice, whether to leave his privileged but uncertain position as a claver, or take his chances rescuing his sister's child and trying to survive in the countryside on their own.

In the fourth book of her post-apocalyptic series, The Shade of the Moon: Life As We Knew It Series, Book 4 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) Susan Beth Pfeffer takes on the moral dilemmas resulting from such a chain of events, disasters so overwhelming that humans fall back on a primitive and unequal society, at first in order to survive, but soon as a means to preserve power for the few. Whether or not our society would so quickly revert to oligarchy, Pfeffer's story deals frankly with the ethical choices that such a conceivable society would mean for earth's survivors. For those who have read her powerful, best-selling first book, Life As We Knew It: Life As We Knew It Series, Book 1 this story, albeit with some questionable twists of plot, will be a must-read new novel for young adult readers, especially those who value the insights found in dystopian fiction. Booklist says, "Pfeffer's well-written take on what life might be as it returns to 'normal' is sometimes brutal and always depressingly real."

In addition to her popular first book, earlier books in this series are The Dead and the Gone, Book 2) and This World We Live In: Life As We Knew It Series, Book 3.

Dust and Death: Parched by Melanie Crowder

They were looking for the secret store of water that had sustained the family while the drought sucked the life out of every other living thing.

They had been searching for the old well. But they hadn't known to look past the house, to a ring of stones that marked the place where steps curved down into a cave underground, with a pump and a small pool set into the far end, fed by the deep well Sarel's grandfather's grandfather had dug when he first settled the land.

The men with the guns and the blood-red flags hadn't known to look for the grotto. A grotto belonged in a land where brine and mist filled the air, where water spilled into every solid space.

Not here. Not in this place of dust and death.

The river bottom is filled with dust, few plants survive, and the land is filled with roving gangs who kill for water. Sorel and her dogs, out foraging through the dry morning grass, stay hidden when a gang raids their farm, shoots her parents, and in frustration set fire to their house. Now Nandi, her Rhodesian ridgeback mother dog, and her puppies are Sarel's only companions as she buries her parents under stones, packs up the last water from the grotto pool and set out to search for food and water in what is now endless desert.

Meanwhile, the boy Musa, bartered by his older brother Dingane to the Mandie gang because of his dowsing talents, has his manacles removed and is taken into the countryside to look for water, water that is nowhere to be found in the city or countryside around it. Musa senses there is water, much underground water somewhere to the south, and when he manages to escape from his captors, he flees toward the water he hopes to be found there.

Sarel manages to stay alive by foraging for roots and her dogs hunt and share their kills with her, but even they are beginning to succumb to thirst when they find Musa, very weak and near death. Grudgingly Sarel takes him back to the grotto and shares what little water still seeps to the surface there until he is strong enough to convince her that he believes water is near and that he can find it. But they are too weak to search very far from the ruined farm house. And then Dingane and the gang who had held Musa come, still searching for him, and Sarel and Musa escape again into the desert without hope.

The gang kills Dingane, and fleeing, Musa and Sarel lose each other. It seems that each must die alone in this wasteland.

Then Sarel remembers something her mother had once told her.

Rainwater tunnels through porous rock, until it is brittle as a sun-bleached bone; until one day the ground falls away, causing a yawning pit that lays bare the world beneath.

A sinkhole.

It was from there Sarel heard Musa shout.

There's the water of life down deep in Melanie Crowder's debut novel, Parched (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) in a novel that is as intense as the heat, as searing as the drought which is as much an enemy as the roving gang of young warlords that the characters flee. Told in three voices, the voice of Sorel, Musa,and of Sorel's dog Nandi, the story of this novel is one of survival under the most extreme of circumstances, a drought which has turned a land flowing with water, a place of rivers, fountains and green lawns, into a baking desert. But like the thorn trees from which Sarel harvests bitter fruit and the baobab tree which Musa taps for its store of water, Crowder's characters have deep roots in life, and how they continue is an absorbing story of the will to survive. Stark and arresting, a story of despair and hope and friendship which stays deep in the memory, this novel lays bare the essence of what human life is at its source.