The Kill Order, by James Dashner (2012)

Teresa looked at her best friend and wondered what it would be like to forget him.

Thirteen years before Thomas and Teresa entered the Maze, Mark lives in a world that has been ravaged by heat and radiation.  Living in an encampment in the Appalachian Mountains in western North Carolina, Mark and his friends have had to fight to survive the year of death and terror.  Life is not easy for the survivors.

The sun flares struck with little warning.

Mark and his best friend, Trina, try their best to be happy and make each day count, but the memories always keep coming back.

The memories.   They never let him go, not even for a half hour.  They always had to rush back in, bringing all the horror.

The Kill Order tells what happened with the sun flares struck the planet.  The intense heat and radiation.  How lucky Mark and Trina were to be underground on the subtrans.  How lucky they were to meet Alec and Lana.

At the camp, everything changed in an instant.

But their laughter was cut off by a strange sound.  Something Mark hadn't heard in over a year, and he hadn't expected to hear it ever again.

The sounds of engines in the sky.

This is the first sign of advanced technology since the sun flares.  The Post-Flares Coalition (PFC) delivers supplies to Asheville, but this berg is unmarked.  Five people wearing bulky rubber suits emerge from the berg, each holding a black tube like a gun.  They spray the survivors with darts.  Some are killed immediately.  Others die a much more painful death.

Alec and Mark make their way to the berg to learn more about this attack.  Sealed boxes with warning symbols.

Virus VC321xb47

Highly Contagious

24 Darts, Extreme Caution

Mark and Alec meet Deedee, a young child who has been abandoned by her village after they were attacked by a similar berg.  She had been shot in the arm, but everyone left her there, alone.  She is immune to the virus.

The Killing Order is an exciting read to learn about the devastation after the sun flares and about the virus, later called the Flare.  Filled with suspense, this was one of my favorites in this series.  

Rating:  10 out of 10 stars

To check this book out at NOLS, click HERE!

The other books in this series:

Birthmarked, by Caragh M. O'Brien (2009)

In the dim hovel, the mother clenched her body into one final, straining push, and the baby slithered out into Gaia's ready hands.


For years 16-year old Gaia Stone knew she would be a midwife.  Gaia learned all of her skills from her mother, the only midwife in Western Sector Three of Wharfton.  Everyone serves the Enclave, and midwives are required to advance the first three babies born each month.  Advancing means that the babies are taken from their birth families immediately after they're born and taken to live inside the Enclave, a life of privilege and security.

"You can't," she whispered.  "You can't take my baby.  She's mine."

"I have to," Gaia said, backing away.  I'm sorry.

"But you can't," the woman gasped.

"You'll have others.  You'll get to keep some.  I promise."

"Your baby will be well cared for," she said, using the phrases she'd learned.  "You've provided a great service to the Enclave, and you will be compensated."

Suddenly Gaia's parents are taken to the Enclave for questioning, and Gaia is ordered to take up her mother's duties as midwife and serve the Enclave in Western Sector Three.


Gaia has never questioned the Enclave, never worried about the monthly quota of babies.

No deformed babies were ever advanced, for any reason.  For Gaia, one accident had guaranteed a life of poverty outside the wall, with no education, no chance for good food or leisure or easy friendships, while the girls her age who's been advanced were now in the Enclave, with boundless electricity, food and education...She would make sure that the babies in her care had the opportunities she'd never had, those lucky three every month.

Gaia learns that her parents are in the Enclave prison, accused of being traitors.  Gaia is determined to do whatever she needs to do to help her parents escape from the Enclave.


Birthmarked is filled with twists and turns, a code that needs to be cracked, promises that need to be kept, and romance.


To check this book out at NOLS, click HERE!

Rating:  7 out of 10 stars
* mild language, sexual inferences


Next:

The Lost Code: Book One of the Atlanteans, by Kevin Emerson (June 2012)

The morning after I arrived at Camp Eden, I drowned for the first time.

Owen Parker has always felt out of place, odd man left out.  He is from Yellowstone Hub, and he took the MagTrain to what used to be Minnesota because his dad entered him into a drawing to win a spot at Camp Eden, a summer camp in the EdenWest Biodome.

He kept saying how a month at Camp Eden was a month I didn't have to spend scraping by out at Hub, a month when I didn't have to help him with his breathing issues, the nebulizer packs and the beige phlegm that never seemed to get all the way down the drain, a month when I could have fun like people used to.

The camp used to be called Camp Aasgard.  Lake Eden was once part of Lake Superior, and this site has been a summer camp for 200 years.  Viking ruins were rumored to have been found here. 

There used to be 10 billion people on Earth, but 60% of the population was lost during the Great Rise, when global warming and the climate spun out of control.  Wars, plague and chaos have followed in its wake.  Now the population lives in soaring temperatures and the ozone is depleted.  The only safe havens are the thin rim of land in the Habitable Zone and the five Eden domes.

Life in the Eden West biodome looks idyllic.  The temperature remains at 22-degrees Celsius, the ideal summer temperature before the Great Rise.  After 15 years of construction, the dome was completed in 2056.  It is 6-kilometers in diameter, home to 200,000 people.  But there are rumors that the Eden domes are failing. 

Owen, awkward and prone to injuries, drowns on his first full day at Camp Eden.  Instead of dying, he sees a siren in the water.

-You are not at the end, it said.
-I'm dead, I thought back.
-No.  This is just the beginning...Find me.  In the temple beneath the Aquinara.

-What is oldest will be new.  What was lost shall be found.
-What?
-Find me, Owen.

The life guard, Lilly Ishani, saves Owen from the water.  She tells him not to trust anyone.

Her gaze was still so odd...Then she quickly leaned in.  "No matter what happens in the next couple days, don't tell them anything.  And especially don't tell them how long you were down there.

Later Owen wakes to bandages around his throat, but he can't remember getting cut or scratched while he drowned. 

I ran my fingers over the bandages.  Hotter.  And I was starting to have this weird urge.  I didn't get what it was, I just knew that I couldn't lie there anymore.  I had to get up.  Had to do something.  It was almost like I wasn't in control of myself.

Owen suddenly finds himself rapidly changing, emotionally and physically.  Are there others who are like him?  What has caused the changes?  Who is the siren?  And what is EdenWest hiding?  Owen follows his instincts and learns the truth about who he really is. 

The Lost Code is a SUPER-exciting read!  I hope Kevin Emerson is busy writing the second book, because once this book hits the shelves, readers are going to demand book two immediately!

Rating:  10 out of 10 stars
*mild language, mild romance