Stevie‘s review of The Doomsday Kids: Liam’s Promise (The Doomsday Kids Book 1) by Karyn Langhorne Folan
Young Adult Dystopian Science Fiction published by K Squared Books 26 Mar 14
I wasn’t sure what to expect with this story, having picked it up with an idea of reading more YA SF and not recognising the author’s name, although it seems there’s quite an extensive backlist out there. In the UK, we’ve been possibly shown quite a skewed view of the survivalist and home-schooling movements across the Atlantic, but Liam and his family seemed to be very different to those stereotypes.
Liam is back in the mainstream school system for the first time in five years, and he’s having difficulty fitting in. The only people he connects with are a teacher, who is also one of those anticipating a WWIII-scale disaster, and a girl in his year-group who’s grown up in the care system. When Liam’s mother calls him during class to warn him that the unthinkable has happened and an airstrike from unnamed enemies is imminent, he first warns those two – taking the girl with him – and then hurries to collect his younger sister, who has Downs Syndrome, and get her to the safest place he knows – the bunker under his parents’ house.
Liam’s sister also insists on bringing a friend with her – a younger girl who speaks little English and whose mother was recently deported to El Salvador – and when they all arrive back at the house they find four more youngsters trying to ransack the place. All eight of them end up in the bunker – really only designed for four – and tensions run high. At last Liam decides that it’s safe for them to move on – to his father’s mountain hide-out – and their great journey of several hundred miles, first in a van and then on foot, begins.
Rather typically for the genre, all the adults are dead, missing, or outright hostile to the kids, and so they have human antagonists to fight as well as the forces of nature and the aftermath of the nuclear strikes. This story has its moments, and there is a good racial mix, along with positive representations of people with disabilities, but I find some of the situations and the ways the kids get out of them a little too unbelievable and the portrayal of Liam’s sister a little inconsistent. The story ends on a rather large cliff-hanger as well, and I am rather disappointed not to be given any indication of when we might expect the next book.
Grade: C
Summary:
“Get to the Mountain Place!”
With those words, eight kids embark on a terrifying journey to survive a massive nuclear blast that destroys the world they once knew.
In the wreckage of their community, without food or transportation, their only hope of safety is to walk to a mountain cabin almost two hundred miles away. But the journeying under gray, radioactive skies brings the kids face to face with death and danger, deprivation and disease and worst of all: the realization that life will never be the same again.
Fifteen year old Liam Harper narrates their survival odyssey in this first book of The Doomsday Kids series.
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