Blood Red Road (Dust Lands #1) by Moira Young

Blood Red Road
 by Moira Young

5/5 Stars on Goodreads

100%

Recommended if you liked: The Hunger Games/ Katniss Everdeen, Awesome protagonists, unique worlds, dystopian/post-apocalyptic.

Review: SPOILER FREE

I originally had borrowed Blood Red Road from my friend who had it sitting out on her side table forever. She had never read it, and I was curious enough. So, I borrowed it, and in my book club we decided that it would be our BOTM. I'd never heard anybody talk about it before, and I had never heard of Moira Young. We decided that it would be an adventure to read a novel completely unknown to us for our first book club book. Once we read it, we were very glad that we indulged.
 Firstly, the novel starts off with this prophecy that reminded us of Disney's Brave "if yew had a chance teh change yer fate"... so immediately I imagined all of the characters speaking in a Scottish accent like the characters in Brave. I think that the accent is actually supposed to be southern, but I couldn't shake the Scottish accent. It also didn't help that the novel is told in this kind of broken English, or so my friend put it, "Hagrid Speak." The entire novel is written like how Hagrid speaks in HP, and that added to the accent in my head. At first I thought that the way the story is told would be annoying and that it'd take a while to get into the way it's written, but it didn't. After a few pages I was hooked, and I didn't even notice that it was any different. It was interesting that the characters definitely speak like the survivors of a lost civilization. They didn't say your or you're they said yer. Ezzackly is exactly and they also use a lot of butchered colloquialisms that we would recognize, such as say la vee for c'est la vie. Young made a very interesting decision to omit most forms of punctuation, especially in omitting quotation marks when a character is speaking. But rather than hindering the story, it definitely enhanced it, and it made the story the fast paced adventure that it was meant to be. I had the chance to meet Moira Young in a meet&greet for the release of Raging Star, and we were able to ask questions to the author. My question was about her decision to not write with the quotations. As she put it, the book just flowed that way. She wanted the book to be written in concise sentences to allow you to keep up to pace with the adventure. Which is exactly what happens.

Along with the quick writing style, the writing itself is positively mesmerizing. The way Young writes and the symbolism she incorporates is spectacular. I love when there are motifs and sentences that repeat throughout a novel, and they are frequent  in the series. In Blood Red Road, it is the idea that Saba always follows Lugh. That all changes at the end, when Saba leads the way for Lugh.

The world that the Dust Lands series exists in is a dystopian wold that is not frequently visited, if at all. If we are to create a Spectrum of Post-Apocalyptic Novels in Relation to The Apocalypse, it would look something like this:

At one end you have novels like Angelfall by Susan Ee which happen at the time of the Apocalypse, and everything is chaotic. We recognize the world that is being destroyed as our own.

At the other end of the spectrum we've got our typical Dystopian novels like The Hunger Games, Divergent, Delirium, The Selection series, The Matched series, etc. This is a time way after the apocalypse, where a moderately functional, usually corrupt, society has been re-established and there is some kind of order.

Smack dab in the middle is where you'd find the Dust Lands Series. It's after the apocalypse, but before civilization has been re-established. There are apparent remnants of an older time, that we would recognize, but people are living fairly nomadic lives, in small groups. There are no laws and everyone fends for themselves. It's a setting I think is rarely explored, and I've never read another series like it. The closest I could think of is The Book of Ember series.

As a protagonist, Saba is amazing. She is bad-ass through and through. From the very start we can see that she is a very strong minded determined character. When Lugh is taken she doesn't hesitate to go after him.  She undergoes her first and biggest character transformation when she in the Cage in Hopetown. For the rest of the series she feels the 'red hot' coursing through her at times of high action. If there is something to be said about the series as a whole, it is that A LOT happens. A lot. There is constant action. There is never any waiting around for something to happen. Saba is always leading people through making decisions.

When Saba is first taken to Hopetown by the Pinches, we first see DeMalo. The first time you see him, and she notices something about him, you know he is going to be important. In Hopetown we meet Epona, and Jack. When they escape from Hopetown, we meet the Free Hawks. Saba's goal in Blood Red Road is to get her brother back, and she pulls all the stops to do so.

Overall, I loved this book. I thought at first that it was a stand-alone, until I saw that it had Rebel Heart as it's sequel. I'm glad that the series continued, and we got to see more of the world. Reviews for the next two novels in the series coming soon!

This was my tweet after Blood Red Road and Moira Young favourite-d it! YAY!