Exodus - Julie Bertagna

[Mark Robson]

In a nutshell Exodus is the story of a flooded earth about a hundred years hence. Global warming has continued unchecked. The polar ice caps have melted and sea levels have risen. A huge sea surge has drowned Europe and those who have survived are struggling to make their way to the great sky cities that have been constructed in key locations around the world. But there is not room for everyone. The sky cities have shut their doors to refugees.

It's been a long time since I last read a book written in the present tense, which marked Exodus as different from the opening few paragraphs for me. However, I was soon to find that the perspective was not the only fresh experience I would gain from this novel. Julie paints characters with many facets that sparkle in the mind like freshly cut gems.

Mara is a great tragic heroine, for whom you cannot help but feel, as layer after layer is stripped from her until her innermost hurts and fears are laid bare for the reader to share and feel with her. Julie then carefully reconstructs her, demonstrating the resilience of human nature and the inventiveness that can be born from desperation.

Although written for the YA market, this is a book that can - indeed should and will - be enjoyed by many adults for years to come. The quality of the writing alone will ensure that it will endure on the shelves long after many of the current authors have been and gone. This is a book that should be on your reading list.

 

[alicia12345]

Exodus is set in the year 2099, when the Earth has all but drowned and only a few islands remain habitable. Mara is confined to her fast-disappearing island home of Wing, which is ravaged by fierce storms and an ever-dwindling supply of food, and where every night she escapes into a virtual world known as the Weave. One night, she discovers ‘proof’ of the mythical Sky Cities – entire cities that rose into the sky and kept their inhabitants safe from the flooded world below – and sets about convincing everyone of their existence, keeping secret the fact that she only discovered their existence from a talking fox, who may or may not be an enemy… She convinces the community to set sail on a terrifyingly dangerous journey to find these Sky Cities; but what will they find there?

I really wasn’t sure about this book at first – the blurb made it sound a teensy bit corny and when I started reading it, there wasn’t much of a story (in fact, the story doesn’t really kick off until about 75 pages to the end) and the present tense in which it is written takes a bit of getting used to – but I was intrigued by this incredibly detailed future that Bertagna had created and was interested to know what would happen when the story did kick off; and boy, am I glad I did! Not to say that there was no story before the ‘pick up the pace’ point – the book was beautifully written throughout and those pages were quite vital to the plot of the story, as well as essential in making connections with the characters in the book.

The characters are all really well developed and you genuinely care about them when horrible things happen to them. You also really feel for them and their situation – after all, the book in set just 90 years away, in a world that struggles to survive because of extreme flooding; a world that is frighteningly likely to happen and it could be our great-grandchildren that live in the nightmare-world, making it an eye-opening, powerful read.

An exceedingly beautifully written and thought-provoking read. I cannot wait to read the rest of the trilogy!

 

[Stephen Palmer]

It's a superb book for sure.