April 18, 2016
Elka, the 17-year-old orphan who narrates this arresting, if grisly, debut from Titan Books managing editor Lewis, struggles for survival in the land once known as British Columbia, which has been laid waste by two wars that destroyed most of humankind. A stern woodsman took in Elka when she was seven. Known to her as Trapper, he’s the only parental figure she has known. On a rare visit to a distant town for supplies, Elka gets an alarmingly different picture of her protector. He’s wanted for multiple murders, in which she will soon be sought as an accomplice. Trapper’s years of tutelage have well equipped Elka with the hunting, tracking, and other skills she will need to try to elude both him and a relentless magistrate, Jennifer Lyon, who gets on his (and her) trail. But Elka is woefully ill-prepared to handle the human predators who cross her path. Lewis takes the reader on an overwhelmingly grim odyssey that highlights the striking wilderness landscape and Elka’s grit. Agent: George Lucas, Inkwell Management.
May 1, 2016
A girl on the run in a post-apocalyptic wilderness soon realizes that your past can not only haunt you, it can kill you. Elka, now 17, can barely remember a time when she didn't live deep in the woods of BeeCee (presumably British Columbia) with a man she calls Trapper. In the wake of a thunderhead, superstorms common after an unnamed Rapture-like event decimated the population, he rescued her at age 7 and taught her all the things a woodsy father does: hunting, shooting, skinning. But Trapper doesn't just kill deer: he kills people. His real name, Elka learns, is Kreager Hallet, and he's a wanted man, pursued relentlessly by the steely-eyed, six-shooter-carrying magistrate Jennifer Lyon, who's so much a caricature from the Old West that it's hard to take her seriously. Elka herself strains credulity, as Lewis attempts, unsuccessfully, to create a unique dialect--substituting, for example, "a'" for "of"--for a character whose motivations, and intellectual abilities, fluctuate wildly. When Elka discovers Hallet's true nature--and that she's on the hook for the killings, too--she sets off to find her real parents, who left her with her grandmother years earlier to go in search of gold. The enemies she encounters in nature (like a 600-pound brown bear) aren't nearly as vile as the majority of humans she meets, save for the resourceful (and specifically literate) Penelope, Elka's only true friend. But Hallet won't let his little girl go without a fight. A romp through the frozen woods on the trail of a killer who's also hunting you can be satisfying, but this debut is a rabbit snare that comes up empty time and again.
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December 1, 2016
In a postapocalyptic world where nature has become just as violent as humanity, and humanity even more violent after the "Fall," or as the protagonist's nana called it, the "Big Damn Stupid," dangerous storms called thunderheads are potentially deadly. Lost after barely surviving a thunderhead, Elka is sheltered by a man she eventually calls "Daddy." But he is so much more than a father, and eventually Elka realizes that she has a debt to pay-and he is the payment. This is a riveting tale of evil, horror, survival, retribution, and redemption. Teens will get caught up in the story as Elka crosses the blighted land and her equally blighted mind in search of the truth. However, thanks to Daddy's inadvertent teaching, the protagonist is nothing if not a survivor, and she and her companion wolf strike out to do what needs to be done. Elka has an original voice that reads naturally. This is destined to join favorites like Sasha Dawn's Oblivion and Lisa McMann's Dead to You. VERDICT A wild ride that will draw readers down the road and through a gamut of psychological suspense and danger to the very last word. For young adults who appreciate the distinctive and different.-Gretchen Crowley, formerly at Alexandria City Public Libraries, VA
Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
May 1, 2016
Lyon shouldn't come looking for me no more. Unless a' course, Kreagar tells her the truth. Determining that truth is behind Lewis' debut, an unrelenting psychological thriller of wilderness survival wrapped in a terrifying hide-and-seek game of trying to escape an unspeakable past. After losing her Nana in a storm at age 7, Elka is taken in by Kreagar Hallet, a man she comes to think of as a father. At 17, she learns Hallet, whom she calls Trapper, is a vicious serial killer. Fearing for her life, Elka flees north to escape him and the coldhearted, vengeance-seeking Magistrate Lyon, who is determined to bring the murdererand anyone associated with himto justice. She knows Trapper is hunting her as well, leaving a bloody trail of misery in his wake. Elka must use all the skills Trapper taught her to survive and face the terrors she's denied for the last 10 years. Fans of suspense with a touch of horror will be pulled into Elka's intense struggle to find peace and redemption as the whole truth is finally revealed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)