Shade’s Children by Garth Nix. Sci-fi dystopian young adult thriller.
In Shade’s Children the planet has been taken over by mysterious beings. Every person over the age of 14 at the time of the takeover disappeared and humans are bred, aged 14 years and then become “meat.” The book follows a groups of young rebels who manage to escape captivity and are led by Shade, the last adult human on the planet.
Onward – to spoilers.
My favorite aspect of this book was p that the author does not attribute higher intelligence or misguided but noble motives to the conquerors of the planet. They are mysterious but in the end revealed to be venal. They enslaved the planet because they wanted a playground and humans are their pawns. Their technological advancement does not confer greater morality. If their back story parallels with Shade’s development, it may be that their advancement was what drained their moral compass in the first place.
Real sacrifice is hard to find in young adult literature. Death and sex are either avoided or glossed over. Nix does not shy away from the difficult choices his characters need to make. He ties them into the hero archetype: people who are necessary to success in a conflict but because of that they cannot return to the fold afterward. Two of the main characters sacrifice themselves without hesitation. Throughout the book Shade conducts interviews with some of the children. Some of them explicitly state that they see no future for themselves if they win in their war against the Overlords. The ease of the decision to give their lives flows smoothly. It isn’t an out of character departure or a return to virtue by fallen characters, although that happens too.
The end of the book is bittersweet but was the only ending that would not have seemed contrived. It is an excellent and challenging piece for a book marketed to young adults and I’ll be keeping it on the shelf for my nieces and nephews.
-fyre