Alex and his friends and family live in a compound designed to protect them from savage creatures living in the forest. The creatures are not seen, but their handiwork is left on gruesome display, generating fear within the group and gratitude for the protection. And there’s a lot to be grateful for. They are housed, fed, given medical checkups, playtime.
But then we find out they are housed in a barn-like structure where everyone is crammed in like livestock. Their medical checkups consist of being poked, prodded, and measured without any thought to their comfort or dignity. And while the strongest ones are kept, and sometimes chosen to be “breeders”, the weakest ones disappear. Gunshots ring through the air and they look at each other in disbelief. Surely, they didn’t kill the weak one. They wouldn’t do that.
The children are kept there until they are teenagers, then taken somewhere else in a truck. Some like to think it’s somewhere better. But some of the mothers suspect otherwise. Alex’s mother keeps urging him to escape with Smithy, one of his many “cousins”. The word “clones” is thrown out now and then. Adolescents from a different life, one with schools and private homes, come to peer at and tease the ones in the compound. When the truth is revealed at the end, it is not a complete surprise, but one that I kept shying away from because it was too gruesome to contemplate. But there it was.
I enjoy this author’s style of writing. It’s not overly dramatic, easy to follow, and full of descriptive imagery and lovely rhetoric. The characters are well-developed and I found myself connecting with Alex right from the beginning. I felt his confusion, his doubts, his fears, as well as his adolescent crush. Clues are left throughout the book as to where the story is headed, but also to feed the reader’s doubts that it could possibly be headed in that direction. The end is nowhere as near as violent as his other book, The Hybrid.” It does leave a bad taste in your mouth, however.
I finished the book in three days, which is something I haven’t done in a long time.
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