Jeff Hirsch is another author who was at the Anderson’s Bookshop Young Adult Literature Conference and he too has written a dystopian novel. This is his first.
It is a cool cover. Did you know that most of the time authors have no choice in the covers that are chosen for their books? I don’t know if he had any input or not.
There has been a “collapse” after a terrible war and the United States is not as we know it. The Eleventh Plague was a plague release by China and it killed millions of people. Stephen was born after this war and all he knows is the world that exists in his time. He and his father and his grandfather are salvagers – they roam the country looking for items that they can trade for food and clothes. Now even that life is disappearing when his grandfather dies and his father is injured so badly by slavers that he falls into a coma.
Stephen and his dad end up at a place called Settler’s Landing. Stephen has to learn to trust people and this is difficult. His grandfather taught him to never trust anyone. Now he has to learn who he can trust and who he can’t trust. Stephen has to make his own decisions, he has no one else to rely on to make those choices.