Review: Blood Red Road by Moira Young

Title:  Blood Red Road
Author:  Moira Young
Series:  Dustlands
Publisher:  Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
Publication Date:  June 7th 2011
Links:  Amazon | Goodreads
Rating: 

From Goodreads:

 "Lugh's gone. Gone. My golden heart is gone. I kneel in the dust. The tears roll down my face. An a hard red rain starts to fall." When her "older" twin brother is captured by marauding horsemen, Saba knows that she will have to leave the ravaged landfills that have supported her family since the destruction of their civilization. Moira Young's Blood Red Road marks the auspicious beginning of an ambitious post-apocalyptic series that will ensnare your attention.

Review:

So, I try not to get too gushy in my reviews, and it’s usually pretty easy to avoid that because most books don’t warrant gushiness, no matter how good. But Blood Red Road deserves high praise. I normally hate to make these types of comparisons, but the easiest way to describe this book is Hunger Games meets True Grit, both of which merit gushing on their own. There’s a strong female lead, which fulfills the comparison to both the book and the movie, but the comparison to True Grit is due more to the dialect and setting of Blood Red Road. But it’s so much more than that. It’s an action-packed rescue adventure, and it is epic in its awesomeness. Truly.

Saba is a gritty, hard-to-like character when her tale first unfolds, but she really grows as a character and as a person through the span of the book. She’s charged herself with rescuing her twin brother, who was mysteriously kidnapped just after their 18th birthday. Saba has a terrible temper, and her younger sister is trying what little patience she has on this quest, but she’s determined to see this thing through to the end.

I don’t want to go into the story much more than that, for fear of spoiling anything. I hadn’t read much more than the Goodreads synopsis – and the beginning of a few reviews that started with “This is the best book I’ve read this year,” or something along those lines – before diving into the story and so I had no idea what to expect from this novel. That’s the best way to go into any book, I think, but especially this one. Like, I really want to tell you about Saba being forced to [redacted] and the [redacted] she and [redacted] face, but I seriously want you to read it for yourself.

This book was so amazing and unexpected that, although I read a version online courtesy of Pulse It!, I still went out and bought the book because I fully intend to re-read it. Also, I plan to make everyone I know read it…especially all of those that I forced on to The Hunger Games bandwagon. This was such an incredible read, and it’s not even the end of Saba’s story. After the [redacted], I can’t imagine how the author can top this first installment! Sorry, I couldn’t help one last attempt at a, ahem, spoiler…but I just can’t ruin it for you guys. You’ll just have to read it for yourselves to see why it’s so gush-worthy.

**Please do not let the dialect and lack of proper punctuation deter you from reading this novel. If anything, those add to the brilliance of the story.**

Alright, alright, if you must have some spoilery material, here's the book trailer: