In passing period, those fleeting social moments that teenagers treasure, Katie abandoned her friends and burst into my classroom. She clutched a novel, Blood Red Road by Moira Young, to her chest and vibrated.
“Mrs. Smith-Herron! Mrs. Smith-Herron, you have to read this book.”
“I just finished it,” I grinned.
“Don’t you love it? I can’t stop reading it!” Katie squealed, as she literally bounced on her toes. “The relationship between Saba and Jack is the best. Can we read all block today? Please?”
Katie’s testimony is the best review this novel can get. Yet besides that fact, I, too, am smitten. Dystopian and/or post-apocalyptic novels are a hot genre with my teenagers right now, and Blood Red Road falls into this category, but it is so much more.
Saba lives on the edge of dying lake, enduring dust storms and her younger sister Emmi, worrying about her sky-gazing, prophetic Pa, and shadowing her twin Lugh. It doesn’t seem as though her life is going to change, but then four horsemen in black arrive within a red, colossus storm and shatter Saba’s world. Lugh is taken from her, tied to a horse and stolen for vile purposes. Saba’s determined to get him back and starts on a journey that holds surprises for everyone, including herself. It is Saba’s voice that seizes the readers, holding us captured as we travel on the quest with her: crossing the Sandsea where “dead souls, turned into sand spirits what wail in the night an cry fer their lost lives” live, fighting in the Cage where “[t]hey call me the Angel of Death,” partnering with the Free Hawks who are “[w]arriors . . . an occasional highway robbers,” and, of course, teaming up with dauntless Jack who has “a cocky, jimswagger grin like he’s king of the world.”
And, it is her voice that lingers with me as I wait, impatiently, for the next book in the series. In the meantime, I hook my students on this engaging tale so I have someone to talk to about the characters and world until then.
