Book Review: Blood Red Road by Moira Young

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Lugh was born first on Midwinter Day, Saba two hours later.  That's how it's always been - Lugh goes first and Saba follows behind.  Lugh is taken by a group of black-robed men on horses in the middle of a dust storm, there is never any doubt in Saba's mind - she will follow and get Lugh back.  Saba knows she's nothing without her twin.  She needs nothing and no one but Lugh, especially not her baby sister, 9-year-old Emmi.  Though Lugh has always been kind to Emmi, Saba has never forgiven her sister for their mother's death in childbirth.

Their father murdered by Lugh's kidnappers, Saba strikes out into the barren, wasted landscape, leaving everything behind to follow Lugh - everything except Emmi.  From their home on the dry lakebed of Silverlake, Saba grudgingly treks with Emmi across five agonizing days of desert to Crosscreek and her father's friend Mercy.  There, she discovers that the black-robed men are known as Tonton.  Guards, spies, and executioners, they carry out the corrupt king's orders.  Saba also learns there was a stranger present at Lugh's birth, a man who seemed oddly excited about a boy born exactly at midwinter, so excited that he left before Saba was born.  Mercy believes the stranger has something to do with Lugh's kidnapping and the fact that the men made sure Lugh was born at midwinter before they took him makes Saba believe so too.

Leaving Emmi behind, Saba tracks Lugh into the Sandsea, a desert of treacherous, shifting dunes.  She's headed for Hopetown, a squalid town at the foot of the Black Mountains where Mercy believes she may find answers to why the king's guard would want to take a boy from Silverlake born 18 years ago at midwinter.  Saba doesn't care about finding answers - she just wants to find Lugh and take him back.

With a unique narrative style that lets Saba's voice shine through clear and true, this dystopian novel is the tale of an epic quest not just over a desolate landscape scarred with the ghosts of a violent past, but through the treacherous twists and turns of the human heart.  Saba's journey from a sheltered, selfish girl to a strong, self-sacrificing survivalist is an amazing feat in and of itself, never mind everything she must endure before she finally finds her heart's desire.  Saba's epic quest to find her brother takes her across deserts, into the gladiator cages of Hopetown, across dry, cracked lakebeds filled with monstrous horrors, and deep into the Black Mountains in defiance of a desperate king's thirst for immortality.  For fans of The Hunger Games, Divergent by Veronica Roth, the Choas Walking series and other post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, Blood Red Road is an amazing read.  Don't miss it @ the library!

Megan
(Now reading an advanced reader's copy of Dearly, Departed by Lia Habel - zombie steampunk!!  Need I say more?!)