Author: Scott Cramer
Publisher: Train Renoir Publishing (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!
This middle-grade dystopian novel revolves around antique and ignorant superstitions that comets portend evil. It was weirdly formatted in my Adobe Digital Editions reader. The cover was stretched horizontally, rendering the image of the girl's face very wide and rounded (maybe the comet did it?!). Inside, the text ran all the way out to the edge of the page! There was no margin at all, but it was readable so, no big deal.
This is book one of the "Toucan Trilogy". Why there's this pathological obsession with trilogies these days I can explain only cynically: why go to the trouble of coming up with new creative ideas when you can milk the same one repeatedly? Having read this particular volume, I can’t say I want to read any more in the series. It wasn't technically bad, and by that I mean that there were no huge grammatical or spelling gaffs for example, but the story itself dealt with some really horrendous and rather adult events for the age range at which this is aimed. The worst problem for me was that it really wasn't entertaining.
I'm not the intended audience, of course, and there may be some kids in the intended age range who are into this, but my feeling was that it wouldn’t appeal to a whole heck of a lot of kids in this age group. The problem seems to me to be that it deals with a subject that boys are more likely to be into (rightly or wrongly), yet a lot of it appears to be told from a female perspective. That didn’t ought to condemn it, by any means. I wish things were quite different, but like I said, it seemed to me like it was working against itself because of the subject in juxtaposition with how it was written.
In keeping with middle-grade and YA fiction, main character Abby is a seventh-grader displaced from her friends and home - in this case to a small island off the coast of Maine. Unlike YA and middle-grade, she isn't orphaned - at least not when the novel begins. She's with her father, and her mother is on the way to join them, which immediately told me that mom wouldn’t make it. Whether she's being held in reserve for a tearful reunion in volume three remains to be seen for those who can stand to read that far.
The deal here is the arrival of this comet of doom, through the tail of which, the Earth will pass. Abby's dad is all excited about seeing a purple Moon. How it gets to be purple isn’t explained. At school that day, Abby's teacher, a Mr Emerson, is evidently an idiot as well as the school principal, tells his class the story of an African village which got washed away in a flood. The story involved hippos coming each day to drink from a pond. Given that hippos live in lakes and rivers, spending most of their time immersed in water, it’s highly unlikely that they would trundle overland each day to drink from some little village pond elsewhere!
Anyway, he tells that weird story because it supposedly has a connection with the comet: that if you mess with the natural order of things, then trouble will ensue. His idea of a connection is seriously warped. A massive asteroid slammed into Earth 65 million years ago and messed with the "natural order" of things. If it were not for that, we humans wouldn't even be here! Volcanoes spew millions of tons of dust into the atmosphere, and have done so recently, without any problem caused from interaction with pollution. Indeed, you could argue that nothing pollutes the atmosphere worse than Earth's volcanoes, but of course, that's no excuse for humans polluting it.
Emerson's hypothesis is that Earth's atmosphere is polluted, and this pollution somehow collaborates with the dust from the comet's tail, causing unpredictable results, but in beautiful shades of lavender and purple. This completely neglects to acknowledge the fact that Earth is naturally bathed in space dust. It filters down through the atmosphere every hour of every day. Estimates vary up to 300 tonnes a day dropping onto Earth, resulting in millions of tonnes of it over time. It’s also brought to Earth via meteors which strike routinely. Space dust isn’t new or unexpected, or unnatural.
The tail of a comet is so wispy that it contains very little dust in comparison with what Earth already receives, and it’s unlikely to be contaminated with deadly viruses or bacteria because comets were never part of any eco-system. They're actually the "left-overs" from when the solar system formed and there is a literal cloud or two of them out there on the fringes of the system. Even if I let that slide, however, the comet isn’t the only issue I encountered in this novel. At one point we're told that a dead police officer's pupils are blue. Nope. All pupils are black because the pupil is the aperture in the eyeball though which light passes to the retina. It’s the iris that bears the eye's color! There were other minor issues like this which were no big deal in and of themselves, but when there's a number of them, it can become really annoying.
But let’s put all that aside and see where the story took us. The end result of this comet visitation is that all post-pubescent teens and adults die. The only people left alive are those around Abby's age and younger. How this works exactly, isn’t explained, but it revolves around biochemistry and hormones. The next morning, there's a purple haze (Jimi Hendrix anyone?!) in the atmosphere that quickly thickens to a purple fog. All adults in Abby's local little world are dead. The children quickly realize that things are bad, and that they have only themselves to rely upon. Abby, her brother Jordan, her baby sister Lisette, and the two kids from next door start trying to organize their new life. Slowly they gather other kids together, they move into a large mansion on the island, and they keep chickens and start farming.
This 'space disease' business doesn’t make a lot of sense - but of course that's not confined to this one novel. I see the same issue in other novels and in TV shows and movies like Star Wars and Star Trek. The reason we get diseases here on Earth is purely as a result of evolution. The diseases "grew up" with us (and by us I mean the human race). Over time we became immune or resistant to many of them, but it’s a battle for survival out there, and as diseases mutate, we also have to develop mutations to resist them or we perish.
Despite the resistance we’ve acquired over generations, there are still a lot of diseases which can successfully attack us. The reason this is possible is because, contrary to some religious teachings, all life does indeed share common ancestors, and a virus or bacterium which can adapt to our biology is going to be a successful one. The thing is that many such germs are so closely adapted to a specific organism's biochemistry that they're effectively sterile when they end-up in some other bio-system.
When researchers and film crews go out to study chimpanzees in their natural habitat, they have to wear surgical masks so that they do not risk transmitting airborne diseases to the apes - that's how close we are genetically. But these same researchers don’t do this when studying other mammals because even organisms which are that close to us in so many ways, are still distant enough that their diseases are not a problem for us and vice-versa.
The problem with space-born diseases is that they never grew up with us and were never given a chance to "know our biology", and adapt to it or take advantage of it. This means were are very effectively immune to them. The chances of one of them (assuming they exist) having just the right genetic make-up to be able to kill us off is so slim that it’s non-existent for all realistic purposes. The author does declare the pathogen to be a bacterium. In my very amateur opinion this offers a bit more latitude, but I think it’s still a really long shot.
That aside, the children in this novel are depicted admirably taking charge and stepping up, but this seemed to be embraced rather too maturely to be realistic. I would have expected more despair, tears, in-fighting, and cluelessness, but there was very little. That was unrealistic to me, notwithstanding the somewhat Lord of the Flies ambiance which showed itself at one point. The characters seemed too much like Mary Sues.
On the topic of maturity, there's also some mature language employed here. It’s not a huge amount, but there do appear epithets like 'hell' and 'asshole'. For me, some kids of that age actually employ those terms, so it’s not a problem from an adult perspective. From a middle-grade PoV, however, it does raise some serious questions. One is of course how inappropriate this is, so you might want to keep that in mind when assessing the suitability of this story for your own kids.
The other is more aesthetic and viewed purely from the perspective of how a writer tackles a subject. If this were a novel of street kids living in the inner city - homeless, existing on the edge, toughened and street smart - then this language might be perfectly acceptable incorporated in a novel and even expected on a routine basis, but for every-day kids of this age living on an island in the context of this dystopian novel, should language like this be used? My gut feeling was that it should not.
So, overall, I can’t honestly recommend this novel. The ratio of problematic issues to quality of writing wasn't low enough for me to come down in favor or rating it positively. Your mileage may differ!
