Monday, September 29, 2014

A Promising Start to a New Dystopian Trilogy

Fire Country (Dwellers/Country Saga #4) by David Estes (Self-Published, 2013, 402pp.)

Scrawny, clumsy, head-in-the-clouds Siena lives in fire country, a land where a long-ago catastrophe caused the sky to turn from pale blue to blood red. The average lifespan is thirty years, and mankind has resorted to polygamy to survive. Young people are required by law to start breeding in their mid to late teens, and every three years, teens are paired with new mates during an event known as the Call. This Law is not to be questioned. Or so Siena thinks. An unlikely heroine, she doesn't even begin to question her prescribed role in life until a few months before her Call ceremony. As she prepares to consider her preordained fate as a soon-to-be Bearer, a classmate, Lara, suggests the unthinkable: what would happen if young women rebel against the status quo?

Estes has created a memorable heroine in Siena in this first volume in the Country Saga (sister series to the Dwellers Saga). Although some of the concepts he explores here are a bit cliche (the fire country tribes are too much like Native Americans in some aspects, while their enemies, a notoriously feral all-female tribe, are too much like Amazons), Fire Country still proves to be a promising start to a new dystopian trilogy.

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