This is the first in a series of books where all of a sudden there is no-one over the age of 15, it seems to be the magical number and as soon as you turn 15 you ‘wink out’ and go somewhere else.  It’s an interesting book in that it illustrates, at least for me, how books can polarise people. I read a couple of reviews of it on GoodReads and was quite interested to find people who hated the book enough to struggle to the end and then had to defend themselves whereas I found it a fascinating book.

The basic premise is that one day everyone over the age of 15 disappears, parents, teachers, garbage collectors, everyone. Later on in the book we find people disappearing the second they turn 15 and that scares everyone. Just imagine what happens when the oldest person in the village and surrounding areas is almost 15, my first thought was of Lord of the Flies and judging by the reviews I wasn’t the only one. There are two factions in the place, the village kids (Perdido Beach) and the private school kids (Coates) – the ones who were sent to a boarding school as their parents had money to be able to afford to send them away when they were trouble, not in trouble but trouble with a capital T. Then they start finding out some of them have powers. Different types of powers, Lana is able to heal, Sam is able to create a light which can burn, others can teleport and others can run so fast no-one can see them.

Sam is a reluctant hero, he’s the one who keeps his head and we keep being reminded of this, one day he was in the school bus when the driver had a heart attack, he saw, took the driver out of the seat and brought the bus to a safe stop, ever since then he’s been called School Bus Sam. This is brought up constantly as a reminder that heroes can be anywhere and also that sometimes it only takes a clear head to be a hero. Everyone looks to Sam to lead them but he doesn’t want to do that. Caine is the opposite, he wants power, he wants to lead and he thinks Sam will get in the way so he does everything he can to destroy him. Drake is crazy and loves his guns far too much, he’s just waiting for Caine to ‘wink out’ at 15 so he can take over.

I loved this book. It’s aimed at the young adult market, there is violence and it’s rather more controlled than in Lord of the Flies by William Golding. I had so much trouble putting it down and at 560 pages it took a while to read. I was constantly wondering what was going to come next, what would happen when Sam and Caine came to the point of ‘winking out’? Other things going through my head were that with that kind of stress the kids of Perdido Beach would be maturing much faster than normal but would it be fast enough to replace the population? Would they ever rejoin the world? Would they figure out they needed to grow food and would it be fast enough?

Other things I found interesting about this book were the characters. Little Pete is autistic, he’s lost in his own world and is only interested in his game, but it turns out that when he’s threatened he can remove himself from the scene and saves himself and his sister, Astrid from Drake. Astrid is interesting in her own right. She’s 14, 10 years older than Little Pete, she’s brainy and has no friends as she alienates them by being too brainy and pointing out different parts of speech after they’ve said it. For example:

‘Demand of who’ Sam said. He zipped his jacket. It was chilly. ‘You want to go demand justice from Caine?’

‘Rhetorical question,’ Astrid commented.

Pointing out that it was a rhetorical question was totally useless but this is the kind of thing she did. She did this continually throughout the book, not just this but also helping to steady Sam and keep Little Pete quiet. I suspect she was also on the Autistic Spectrum but much higher functioning than Little Pete.

I’m waiting anxiously for the next book called Hunger and the one after that, Lies. This is one of the books I was given at the Digital Parents Conference last month by Hardie Grant Egmont, it’d be nice if they gave me the rest of the series but I suspect I’ll have to buy or borrow.