What would the world be like if the oldest person in it happened to be 14? Not an orderly and regimed world, that much is understood. If you add the fact that a few of these 14 year olds have paranormal powers, and the small detail that they are trapped inside an impenetrable bubble, that seems like an a recipe for big problems!
In quiet Perdido Beach in California, the unexpected happens one day, everyone over the age of 14 vanishes and a gray bubble witha 10-mile radius surrounds the power plant in the town. Everyone who turns 15 during the event also disappear. Bullies and other natural-born leaders quickly begin to try to take charge. Sam Temple is 14 and takes life easy as a surfer, but takes charge once this unexplained event, which the kids coin “the poof,” happens. The kids work to survive each other and the event as they work to find out the cause the mysterious “poof.”
First off, I found the graphic and wanton violence of this book to be slightly too much. The book and the series can be very violent and even a little disturbing. I’m not a fan of gore or scenes where a person is killed horribly and super violently, and this book has a lot of those. That is the one thing I don’t like about this book, the sheer violence. I don’t mind violence in literature in general, but the way that certain age groups, particularly little kids, die is disturbing. Scenes where kids are ripped apart by coyotes are particularly graphic.
I liked the superpower aspect in this book. The wide variety of powers are pretty neat and the way they are measured is in bars, as in cell phone signal strength. The powers include super-speed, anti-gravity, super-strength, the ability to control density, and more. The bars range in strength from one to four, and only two people in the FAYZ (the Fallout Youth Alley Zone, or what the kids have named the bubble) have powers that strong. The four bar powers include telekinesis and the ability to shoot laser beams. A girl who can read people’s powersw is a two bar herself and has to hold the hand of person she wants to read. The main way powers are channeled in this series is through hands. In order to shoot the laser beams, the boy has to lift his hands and fire them. Also, like most superpowers, they aren’t reliable at first. This leads to many accidents. The kids are not sure how they got these powers, as some occurred before the FAYZ.
Despite the violence, I rate this book an eight out of ten.
#@*(#!*(%JFD —- sorry, I just burned a hole in the keyboard and my teacher disappeared!
