REVIEWS a moment comes
meet LAURA VACCARO SEEGER
Half Lives
By Jennifer Bradbury
Atheneum $16.99, 288 pages ISBN 9781416978763 eBook available Ages 12 and up
By Sara Grant
Little, Brown $18, 400 pages ISBN 9780316194938 eBook available Ages 15 and up
teen
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Half Lives is a smart adventure story, but it’s also perilously full of potential spoilers, so let’s step lightly, shall we? At 17, Icie’s biggest problem in life is that her boyfriend just broke up with her via text message. When she gets a 911 text from her folks, she knows it’s serious—one is highly placed in the federal government and the other is a nuclear physicist—but the crisis that greets her at home changes her life forever. She’s given a crude map, a money belt and instructions to get to an unmarked bunker outside Las Vegas and await further orders. Icie’s journey and what happens at the bunker are just half of the story. Generations later, a society led by teens lives on the mountain where the bunker was, and it’s clear that Icie has left them a legacy of some sort. The way these stories intertwine and reveal information about what happened—and the consequences—keeps Half Lives suspenseful until the very end. Author Sara Grant toggles back and forth between the present and the distant future, and while there are complex love stories in each world, the real meat of the novel is in how things change—or fail to change—over time. Much of this comes through in Grant’s use of language: Icie likes to create new compound words in hopes they’ll catch on, and it’s a pleasure and an ongoing surprise to see where they turn up and how definitions evolve. A few songs on an old iPod become a hymnal of sorts, and “Facebook” takes on a whole new meaning. This isn’t dystopian fiction, but fans of the genre will appreciate the dark humor and complex future created here, which offers up several “a-ha” moments when past and future reveal themselves. Half Lives is tough and scary, but ultimately a story of bravery and hope.
—Deborah Hopkinson
—Heather Seggel
BULLY The author-illustrator of such clever books as Green, First the Egg and What If? Laura Vaccaro Seeger has won numerous awards for her work, including two Caldecott Honors. In her latest, BULLY (Neal Porter/Roaring Brook, $16.99, 40 pages, ISBN 9781596436305), a domineering bull gets his comeuppance from a goat.
r e a d m o r e at b o o k pa g e . c o m
Jennifer Bradbury’s ambitious new novel takes place in 1947 in the Indian city of Jalandhar, near the modern border with Pakistan, just before India is divided into two separate religious states. While the time and place may be unfamiliar to many teen readers, the dramatic, intertwining stories of the three young people at the heart of this story are sure to draw them in. Tariq, a Muslim, would rather not go with his family to start a new life in Pakistan. Instead, he dreams of an education abroad at Oxford. Tariq finds himself increasingly at odds with his old friends, who try to engage him in acts of violent protest against the Sikhs. As Tariq struggles to keep hold of his future, his hopes are fueled when he goes to work for a British cartographer sent to India to establish the new borders. Tariq is sure that with Mr. Darnsley’s help, he can get to England. Also in the cartographer’s household is the beautiful Anupreet, a Sikh, who has already been the victim of the increasing violence brought about by political turmoil. Anupreet and the cartographer’s daughter, Margaret, form a tentative friendship despite their differences. As the political tensions around them escalate, these three young people face intensely personal choices that will affect their lives— and one another. Today’s teens may hear about disputes between Pakistan and India without having a sense of the historical context. In A Moment Comes, Bradbury shines a light on a complex time in history while telling a riveting story about the choices that sometimes determine our lives. Readers can almost feel the humidity, taste the delicious food and feast their eyes, as Margaret does, on beautiful silks in the marketplace. It’s a journey well worth taking.
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