As you might remember I’ve been reading the Gone Series by Michael Grant for a few years, I came to Grant a little late as the series was almost completely published when I found them but I’m trying to be good and read other books as well but this month I caved when I found both books together in the library and borrowed both, I’ve read one after the other so I could move on.

There are six books in this series. Gone, Hunger, Lies, Plague, Fear and Light.

Gone starts the ball rolling by isolating everyone under the age of 15 in a dome, nothing can get in and nothing can get out except as you reach your 15th birthday when you ‘wink out’ and at this stage we don’t know what happens to them. Gone deals with the isolation and the emergence of some of the children with powers. Each book after that then deals with a different problem within the dome.

In Hunger we see how they deal with powers emerging in the animal population and how they cope with the problem of food and it’s interesting to see how different characters come into their own, they’re in the low socioeconomic demographic and therefore have skills high socioeconomic people don’t have and these cooking, foraging skills lead them to be in charge.

In Lies we see how they cope with various lies people tell, while in Plague we see them living or dying with the plague.

The final two books bring the whole thing into perspective as we see Sam dealing with his fear of the dark in Fear…not just his fear as so many people are scared of the dark and in the last few pages the dome becomes clear and the light of the sun comes back. Light finalises everything and we finally see things from the outside world’s perspective.

These are definitely young adult books, there is death, destruction, cruelty, torture, love and references to sex in these books. They are all nicely put together and I couldn’t find fault or continuity errors, a good thing too as young adults are as quick to spot these things and judge as I.

You can see two different covers in this series. I much prefer the black ones as they’re really stark and this illustrates the starkness of the whole series. Yes, there’s a lot of information in the books, Grant doesn’t hold back from the emotional aspects and the descriptions so when I say starkness I mean there’s no covering up, very little alluding to things, except for the sex scenes, not much there.