Review: The Warehouse

The Warehouse by Rob Hart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An extremely well thought out dystopian novel. Cloud has taken over America. It's the online store of your dreams, stocking everything, products sent to you by drone so they're with you almost before they're needed. Cloud now employs most of America, and its CEO controls the government as well. Although he thinks of it as 'advising'. He only wants the best for everyone, after all.

My favourite thing about this fantastic novel is the watch that buzzes on different side to direct the workers. It's such a tiny detail, but it fits and it really shows the work that Rob put into imagining this increasingly possible future. A fantastic read, one that everyone should try.


Dakota didn’t speak. Didn’t look interested in speaking. She walked, and Paxton followed. A few people threw glances their way. He understood this dance. Dobbs called the polo shirt an equalizer. It wasn’t. Didn’t matter if the badge was tin, it still shone if it caught the light at the right angle. 


A tram car pulled in and they climbed aboard. The crowd seemed to part for them. Still Dakota didn’t talk. This, Paxton understood too. For them to talk, to engage in conversation like normal people, would humanize them too much. 


Paxton hated how easy it was to slip back into that mind-set. Like walking the stacks all over again.

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Review: I Am Not a Number

I Am Not a Number by Lisa Heathfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Traditional Party has been voted in. Ruby doesn't think her life will change too much, but her mother and stepfather aren't sure. There are more soldiers in the street, making sure that women are wearing decent clothes and that there are no lewd displays of affection, like holding hands. Then there are arm bands. Then, in the middle of the night, the buses come...


Lisa Heathfield has a gift for tackling difficult subjects in ways that children can understand. She's already taken on cults and parental abuse; in this new book her topics are nationalism and the Holocaust, obliquely. By subjecting her heroine Ruby to horrors that actually happened to prisoners in the concentration camps, Lisa shows how easy it is to fall prey to othering, and how destructive it can be. The increasing dehumanisation of Ruby and the other inmates is very difficult to read, but it's worth it if it starts conversations about this topic.

I'm also very impressed, as I often am with cult novels, at just how easy it is to alter people's thinking, especially childrens', when you control the narrative. Ruby's sister sees everything that's happening, she knows exactly how they're being treated, but because the guards give her extra biscuits she believes everything they're telling her about their political rivals.

The only thing I would have liked is more information or background on the guards. We learn a little bit about the camp commander, but the rest of the guards are an indistinguishable mass of hatred and anger. No one ever even learns any of their names. I would have liked to know how they came to think this was acceptable. But that's a tiny gripe in an otherwise gripping novel.

This isn't the only book of this type I've read, but in the others the camps are usually for people of a particular race, or religion, or skin colour. In this one, it's strictly along ideological lines, and I can't decide if that's more or less scary; that the people doing this to Ruby and the others probably looked just like them. It's a terrifying, but very important, read.




"You'll learn discipline," the guard says. "You'll run the length of the line and back until I tell you to stop."

"Run?" I'm not at school. Why do they want me to run?

"You haven't heard me properly?" The guard steps closer and raises his whip until it's touching my cheek. "I could help by cleaning out your ears with this."

"Run, for God's sake, Ruby," I hear Mum say.

The line of leather presses into my skin.

"Fine," I say, but I don't look at my mum as I know she'll see the fear i'm trying to hide. I won't look at any of them.

I feel every set of eyes on me as I pass, so I focus on the world beyond the fence. In the distance is a mountain and I look at that. I force myself to see how it doesn't peak in a spike. Maybe it's not a proper mountain but it's more than a hill. It's round at the top and joins another, smaller one. They seem very safe. I imagine myself sitting there, hidden among their shape.

My feet pound the wet ground. It's concrete, so it's easier to get a rhythm. At the end I turn around. this way I can see the entrance to the camp. The fence is high, its barbed wire telling me everything. I hadn't noticed the watchtower close to the gate, but it's clear as anything now.There's a guard in it and the silhouette of a gun.

I concentrate on Mum's face as I run back down the line. Her eyes are wild with anger, but her face is stone. Darren holds tight to her hand and he nods at me and says something, but I don't hear it. It's enough though. He's willing me on and it gives me strength.

I know I run past Luke, but I'm too embarrassed to look at him. I'm sweaty and soaked and I know he loves me whatever, but I don't want him to see me like this. I'll have to run past him again and again, looking worse and worse, until the pig of a guard says I can stop.

My legs are beginning to burn as I turn at the end, facing the mountain again. I wish I could look more to the sky but the rain isn't stopping. So I keep going. Running on. Trying to count the sound of my feet on the ground.

"You can do this, Ruby." This time I catch Darren's words and I use them as fuel.

I'm thirsty, but the water falling on me isn't enough.

The guard doesn't tell me it's over. I've never been good at running far and my lungs feel filled with fire. Someone has lit a match in them and now every breath sparks new flames. A stitch is gripping my side.

I'm sure the rain is weakening.

But now they'll be able to see that I'm crying.

I don't mean to but I look at Luke as I pass. I wish I hadn't. It's hopeless despair on his face. His dad is holding his arm, as if stopping him from trying to help me. I won't look at him again. It's made my heart hurt worse and my tears now are for more than just agony and exhaustion and hunger.

A guard grabs me by the shoulder. I collapse into him and he wipes me away like a piece of dirt.

"You may stop," he says, pushing me back into the line between a child and an older man. "Have you learned your lesson?"

I nod, hardly able to hold my head straight.

"I didn't hear your answer," the guard shouts. "Maybe you'd like to run again? Or have you learned your lesson?"

"Yes," I say. My voice squeezes out through my spiky breathing.

"Good."

When he walks away, the man next to me puts out his arm to hold me up.

"You did well," he whispers as finally the rain begins to dry.

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Review: This World we Live In, by Susan Pfeffer

Who will live and who will die?

The third volume of the Last Survivors brings us full circle as Miranda's father returns home, bringing with him his wife, their son, and three strangers; a man called Charlie and two siblings, Alex and Julie. Adding all these people stretches already strained resources to breaking point, and Miranda finds that their strange half‐life can't last forever...


This World brings together Miranda and her family and Alex and his. It starts on April 25th, more than a month since we've last seen Miranda and four months since Alex and Julie left New York. They've all grown in the interim; Alex and Julie are much more of a team, and Miranda has grown out of her teenage all‐about‐me stage. It's back to diary format, too, which makes it interesting; Miranda can only judge Alex and Julie on what she hears and sees, while we know more about them.

While a lot of the book is taken up with the scramble for resources we're familiar with from the first two, there are some huge set‐pieces towards the end, and some painful decisions are forced on Miranda. She copes admirably, in a way she couldn't have in Life as we Knew it or even at the start of This World, proving how much she's grown and matured through her experiences.

It's interesting, too, to watch Alex‐who's kept his faith through everything‐talk with Miranda, who gave only lip service to religion even before anything happened. Their individual points of view are very well represented without either side coming across as too preachy.

I could happily read another twenty books set in this world, but if this is the end, it's a perfect place to stop. Things have gone wrong, but Miranda has learned to look for the good in everything and as long as she has people she loves, she'll survive.


'You have to believe in the future,' Alex said. 'Otherwise there's no point in being alive.'
'That's easy for you to say!' I cried. 'You have your faith, your Church. But I don't believe like that. Maybe I used to but I don't anymore.'
I thought Alex would get angry at me then, but he didn't.
'You don't have to believe in the church,' he said. 'Or even in God. Believe that people can change things.'
'No,' I said. 'I don't know that anymore.' My mind flashed back to the dead man with his dog lying beside him. 'We're all helpless,' I said. 'There's nothing we can do. There's nothing left to trust in.'
'Trust in tomorrow,' Alex said. 'Every day of your life, there's been a tomorrow. I promise you, there'll be a tomorrow.'

Review: the dead and the gone, by Susan Pfeffer

Only the unlucky survive...

Alex Morales lives in New York city. He has no interest in the meteor that's supposed to hit the moon; he has work and school to keep up with, and with his older brother in the Marines and his father away at a funeral he's the man of the house. Not that his sisters seem to pay much attention to him.

When he gets home on the evening of the 18th May, he discovers his mother has been called into work unexpectedly, leaving him with his sisters. In the days that follow, as he realises his parents aren't coming home and life has changed forever, he struggles to keep them together and fed. But worse is yet to come...


Life as we Knew it was set in rural Pennsylvania. Miranda and her family were short of food and heat and water, but their isolation protected them from some of the problems Alex and his sisters face. New York is devastated by the tidal waves, and each time the tide comes in a little more of the city is lost. With government breaking down waste removal ceases, which doesn't seem like a problem until you realise how many people are dying. And with only emergency food supplies making it into the stricken city, it becomes harder and harder for Alex to keep his family alive.

Alex has to make some very difficult decisions during the course of this book. Both his sisters are offered places out of the city, forcing him to weigh their chances of survival against their hatred for being split up. At one point the only way to get food is to trade clothes and belongings looted from dead bodies.

Miranda and her family weren't particularly religious, but Alex and his sisters are devout Catholics and their occasional prayers add a ring of truth to the story. Similarly, while the government was mostly incompetent in LAWKI, here you get the sense that they're genuinely trying to help as many people as possible, particularly in a harrowing scene in Yankee Stadium early in the book.

The book ends on the 29th December, meaning the whole book takes place within LAWKI. And luckily, it escapes the middle—book—in—a—trilogy curse; it's just as strong as the other two.


'It's not Thanksgiving without football,' one of the guys said.
'Touch football,' another said. 'No helmets, no hits.'
'No Cowboys, either,' the first said. 'Jets versus Giants.'
'We need another guy on our team!' another man yelled. 'Come on, kid. You're a Giant.'
And for one glorious moment, that was just how Alex felt.

Review: Life as we Knew it, by Susan Pfeffer

Our world ends tonight...

Sixteen year old Miranda isn't that interested in the meteor that's supposed to hit the moon. She has other things to worry about – her father's new wife's pregnancy, for one, and her best friend's worrying new found religion, for another. The whole meteor thing is just an excuse for more homework, as far as she can tell.

She's wrong.

The meteor knocks the moon closer to the earth. Immediate reports of tidal waves start coming in from around the globe, and that's just the beginning. Earthquakes and volcanoes quickly follow. Miranda and her family are in for the struggle of their lives...

First of all; this is the first of a series, but it stands on its' own — no cliffhanger. Except of course that you'll be desperate to find out what happens next, to Miranda and her brothers and mother.

Now that that's out of the way...

The book's written as Miranda's journal, in present tense, which ratchets up the tension as there's no hint of what's going to happen next until it happens. It also makes it much easier to get inside Miranda's head, to the point that you almost feel what she's feeling...it's a shock, sometimes, to look up from Miranda describing scraping snow off the roof and realise that the sun's shining out here in the real world.

Miranda's world gets smaller in stages; no Internet or phones or TV, no school, no trips to town, no holiday away, and finally no room to be alone. But as her world gets smaller, her ability to see joy in the tiniest things gets larger; a dinner with friends, a piece of chocolate, a joke with her brothers or a conversation with her mother.

A lot of readers have said that this book made them go out and stock up on tinned food and batteries. I'd have done the same if I thought I had any chance of surviving a catastrophe like this one. {I haven't. That's why I like to read about them.} Miranda not only survives, she grows and learns from the experience, and she's much more than a year older at the end of the book, March 20th. {The years are cunningly not mentioned. This worries me a little, but we're past May 18th for this year, anyway.}

One of the best in the post apocalyptic genre, and a welcome respite from vampires.



We are a family. We love each other. We've been scared together and brave together. If this is how it ends, so be it.
Only, please, don't let me be the last one to die.