Review Detail

Evelyn Ronan Truelove (don't call him Evelyn) has a quirky mother who has insisted he learn all sorts of useless skills like fencing and gymnastics,but he's still surprised when she picks him up from school and takes off in their van at breakneck speeding, telling him that his father has been kidnapped and she has to get Ronan to safety. She is also, by the way, a member of something called the Blood Guard, who are trying to protect 36 "pure souls" from an organization called the Bend Sinister that is trying to suck their souls out and cause the world as we know it to end. Alrighty, then! She drops him off at the train station with a backpack and instructions, but strange people start chasing him. When he finally gets away, he's in the company of Dawkins, who is also a member of the Guard, but also Greta, a girl who used to go to his school and whose father is in the FBI. The three take off to Roanoke, but the strange people keep after them. Dawkins gets killed, and Greta and Ronan end up hitching a ride with a boy their age, Sammy, and his pleasant guardians. Who turn out, of course, to be in thrall to the Bend Sinister. More chasing occurs, and the group eventually makes it to Greta's father, who is ALSO a member of the Guard. From there, lots of secrets are revealed, setting up a lot of issues to be confronted in book two of this trilogy.

This book is a perfect example of how important engaging characters and well-paced action are. I was sucked in after the first two pages, because Ronan made me chuckle, and I wanted to know what would happen next. Mr. Roy has clearly been paying attention when he has "edited hundreds of books for major publishers". The intricacies of the Blood Guard are explained in between all of the action scenes, I liked all of the good characters tremendously, to the point where I actually looked at the back of the book to see if Dawkins came back from the dead because I was crushed that he was, well, crushed. Very funny writing, too. My new phrase is "super corn nuts crazypants".