First in the Gone series ...
Gone by Michael Grant.
At 10:00 a.m. on a Wednesday morning all of the grown ups suddenly disappear - pop! - leaving only those under age fifteen. A dream come true! Not. Things in Perdido Beach quickly devolve into Lord of the Flies as the bullies take over and children come to grips with the fact that no one is around to cook, clean, comfort them, or keep a semblance of order. The twist is a supernatural phenomena that may or may not have something to do with the nuclear power plant at the center of a sphere that suddenly encloses the town, preventing escape. A new universe? A barrier beyond which all is normal? The survival/sci fi/thriller/romance is broken up with welcome and well placed bits of dry humor - "He found a set of encyclopedias - like Wikipedia, but paper and very bulky." Doing the right thing prevents any happy ending, begging the reader to move on to the next title in the series - Hunger - to see what happens next.
Second in the Chains - trilogy? series? ...
Forge by Laurie Halse Anderson.
The sequel to Chains, Forge picks up some months after Chains left off with the escape of Isabel and Curzon to New Jersey. Curzon takes over as our narrator and we learn that Isabel has taken their money and left because he refuses to travel on to South Carolina to find her sister Ruth. This is mainly the story of Curzon's inadvertent enlistment into the Continental army and his time at Valley Forge. The descriptions of life as a common soldier are story enough, but Anderson continues to narrate the story of the place of slaves during this time. With the British or the Patriots? She leaves it up to the reader to decide, and the decision is impossible. When Curzon's former owner Bellingham shows up, Curzon's life goes from subsistence living while trying to to freeze to death to one of relative material comfort when Bellingham claims ownership of the boy. Curzon's experience makes clear that freezing and starving with his fellow soldiers is preferable to the humiliation of slavery while laying bare the hypocrisy in the Patriots' qualified call for liberty. The one silver lining is his bittersweet reunion with Isabel, captured and later bought by Bellingham and serving the same master in the same household. This time it is Curzon who masterminds the escape plan, but will it succeed? This time they have an iron collar on Isabel to contend with rather than one branding scar. As in Chains, Anderson provides a nice question and answer about the history behind the story. The end leaves the reader waiting for the next installment - Ashes.
Third in the Girl series ...
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson.
Yet one more volume in a series that keeps one riveted to the page. The story picked up immediately where the last book left off, giving us the benefit of witnessing all of the drama around Lisbeth's capture and the tension of knowing her evil father was just two doors away. Lisbeth's recovery, while somewhat unbelievable, is nonetheless quite gratifying. Each book has had a unifying theme - or ongoing parallel history lesson of sorts; the first was violence against and rape of women, the second was complex math theory, and in this third it is the history of women soldiers. Although the first and last had more to do with the story at hand, I found the second most enjoyable. Maybe because it offered some insight into the way Lisbeth's mind worked. The third and final volume wraps up everything nicely - an enormous task given the many characters developed to the point that they suffered problems and plots of their own - and yet it is a satisfying end. With the author deceased it is a relief that there are no strings left untied, and yet the series was so fun to read that it is sad to finish.
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