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Gone by Michael Grant with it’s black cover and illumines title caught my eye and I was like a month to a flame. In truth, I’ve always wanted to buy this book. But knowing that it was part of a series of books and that I had a number of other books from publicists, I’ve put it off. That was until I saw 3 books for £10 in ASDA and couldn’t resist picking it up.
In Gone everybody over the age of fifteen disappears in the blink of an eye. There’s this impenetrable white wall/dome that extends around the Power Plant for a ten-mile radius encompassing Perdido Beach (a small southern Californian town), The CliffTop (a hotel), Coats Academy (a school for rich but naughty kids), a desert, part of a National Park and some agricultural land. The kids are cut off from the outside world and some are starting to develop powers. Some of the animals are mutating and in a mine deep underground is The Darkness. |
It has a host of likeable characters including: Sam the hero, Quinn best friend to Sam, Astrid the genius and Pete her little brother. There’s also a host of less likeable characters including: Caine the villain, Drake the sadistic and Diana the power reader – who reads kids and rates their powers like a signal indicator on a mobile phone: one bar, two bar, three bar or four bar.
Gone is jam-packed with action, which builds to an epic battle between Sam & Caine and their respective groups of kids. The book answers some of the readers questions like what made the adults disappear? And what created the barrier/dome?
But still leaves plenty of questions like what is the darkness? Will other kids develop powers? What’s the story of that kid from Coats who kept his head down when Caine and the others arrived in Perdido Beach? What will Orc do next? And will he get over Bette?
The book is so absorbing that you’ll find yourself saying ‘Just one more chapter before bed…’ before staying up to read three chapters. I haven’t enjoyed a book this much in ages. The next book in the series is Hunger which I have already started reading.
Review soon,
Antony
