Review Detail

Reader reviewed by darklightkid

It's a pretty ordinary day in Perdido Beach, California...until the moment when every single adult and older teenager (read: over 15 years old) disappears for no apparent reason. At the same time, a strange impenetrable force field cuts off the town and the surrounding wilderness from the outside world.

In the town, several of the kids left behind wonder what happened - but there's not much time to wonder for Sam Temple, who has only about 10 days until his fifteenth birthday, on which day he will very likely disappear like all the other older kids. Kids also start developing unusual supernatural powers. Sam's power is the ability to fire deadly beams of green fire from his hands. Other kids, mostly at Coates Academy in the hills (a place where all the rich and/or troubled kids go) develop even stranger powers, like super speed and the ability to read other people's power levels. The worst of them all is Caine, who has some majorly evil telekinesis abilities.

The weirdest part is, Caine and Sam turn out to be fraternal twin brothers. Both are heading towards their fifteenth birthdays. So what happens next?

The best feature of the novel is that, at the start of each chapter, the reader is given a time countdown to the story's climax (Caine and Sam's fifteenth birthday.) The novel also exists for its high action and relatable teen characters. Its only problem is overlength. At over 500 pages, it feels like the story takes forever. And I also admit that when I first heard that Grant was planning to write a six-book series, I was scared that the sequels would turn out to be more filler than anything else. So far, this isn't really the case for either Hunger (2009) or Lies (2010). Hopefully the remaining books will be just as entertaining as this one (or even better).