Don’t miss the exhilarating new novel from the author of Fat Girl on a Plane, featuring a fierce, bold heroine who will fight for her family and do whatever it takes to survive. Fans of Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Life As We Knew It series and Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave series will cheer for this fast-paced, near-future thrill ride.
If you’re going through hell…keep going.
Seventeen-year-old coder Jinx Marshall grew up spending weekends drilling with her paranoid dad for a doomsday she’s sure will never come. She’s an expert on self-heating meal rations, Krav Maga and extracting water from a barrel cactus. Now that her parents are divorced, she’s ready to relax. Her big plans include making it to level 99 in her favorite MMORPG and spending the weekend with her new hunky stepbrother, Toby.
But all that disaster training comes in handy when an explosion traps her in a burning building. Stuck leading her headstrong stepsister, MacKenna, and her precocious little brother, Charles, to safety, Jinx gets them out alive only to discover the explosion is part of a pattern of violence erupting all over the country. Even worse, Jinx’s dad stands accused of triggering the chaos.
In a desperate attempt to evade paramilitary forces and vigilantes, Jinx and her siblings find Toby and make a break for Mexico. With seemingly the whole world working against them, they’ve got to get along and search for the truth about the attacks—and about each other. But if they can survive, will there be anything left worth surviving for?
Review: This is one of those books that you really cant compare to anything else you've read because it is so different and so unique an despite the fact that it is a total cliche, this book had me on the edge of my seat the whole time.
I'll admit that I haven't read a whole lot of books about teen coders surviving doomsday but that's clearly because I never knew I wanted to read about kick-ass girls like that! This book really does have everything, women defying gender stereotypes, villains that do unpredictable things, typical high-school friendship issues and of course just a little bit of romance. It is somewhat political, totally timely and I really enjoyed it.
Jinx is a great main character because she does have all of those teen traits that we can recognise and identify with but then she has been trained by Dr Doomsday and is also an awesome coder who is great at surviving role play games in her online community. She makes for a wonderful heroines to spend the course of this book with. She has a step sister who is basically the opposite of her and so they counteract one another constantly but that can sometimes be helpful in certain situations. I can't wait to delve a little more into their relationship in the second half of this duology!
The real show-stealer here in terms of characters is little brother Charles, he is so sweet and so quirky and I just loved when he would come into a scene and complicate it or just make everything a little bit lighter. He has his own issues and they can often be problematic when you're trying to run from some unknown force in the middle of a desert. I loved the dynamic between these siblings and I'm really looking forward to seeing more of that in book two.
In terms of events in this book, the plot is one of the twistiest I have read for a long time, I literally didn't predict anything that was going to happen along the way and sometimes you really need a book to come along and shake things up like that. There is quite a lot of violence in this book and peril at every turn so definitely exercise care there if that's not your thing. I will say though I don't think any of the violence or any of the scarier parts were there unnecessarily, I think they were all key to the plot and so I thought they were well-timed and added to that edge of your seat factor.
Now I know you don't normally find me recommending doomsday survival novels on this blog but you do find me recommending books with brilliant character dynamics and kick-ass women defying all of those gender roles to make for some awesome page turning action scenes so I do highly recommend this book. My only issue with it is that now I have to wait for book 2 to come out and I'm just not sure how I'm going to last until it does!
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