2015 Review Round-Up: Juv Fiction: The Scavengers, Michael Perry

The Scavengers
Michael Perry
ISBN: 9780062026163
Juv dystopia, spunky girl heroine, a bit overexplained at the end.
Read Summer 2015

This was a fun "beginner level" dystopia.  It had elements of zombies a la Walking Dead, it has the scrappy heroine and a grizzled old mentor and his kitchen-witchery wife.  Family in peril, younger sibling needing protection.  Bonus points for random wordplay (sometimes genuinely funny, sometimes seemed a bit effortful) and a demented chicken.

Our girl has named herself Ford Falcon because it sounds really cool.  Please don't look at the actual car, she knows it's a beater.  But it does provide a nice cozy place to sleep, all half-buried in the abandoned rural scrapyard her family now calls home.  There aren't many people out in the country now, what with the government offering everyone free food and protection inside the new domed cities.  But a few holdouts linger, and her family is one - or they were, until someone trashes the family home and they all vanish.  Now Ford is on her own (but not really, there are wily neighbors to help out) and it's up to her to find her family, and try to build a home again.  A pretty good yarn, and a good gentle allegory for the push-pull of adolescent yearning to be safe at home, but also pretty sick of being stuck at home.  Recommended for kids who are ok with pretty intense scenes of abandonment and lots of pages spent with creepy corn zombies.

Nonfiction: Build the Perfect Survival Kit (2nd Edition), by John McCann

Build the Perfect Survival Kit (2nd Edition)
John McCann
ISBN: 9781440238055
Read July 3, 2014
Nonfiction: survival kits, useful tools, nifty items in small packages.

This was a really interesting book.  I may not be the perfect audience (the wildest environment I'm in is my front yard) but it does have some nifty things that are good to learn about, and reviews of useful tools and devices.

I especially liked the idea of a personal kit - an altoids tin or a small sewing-kit sized container with various useful implements (waterproof matches, emergency mini led flashlight, duct tape...) where it's not heavy or cumbersome, but you still have something, which is better than a giant pack full of stuff that's somewhere in your closet at home.