The Apocalypse does not end. The Changed will grow in numbers. The Spared may not survive. Even before the EMPs brought down the world, Alex was on the run from the demons of her past and the monster living in her head. After the world was gone, she believed Rule could be a sanctuary for her and those she'd come to love. But she was wrong.
Now Alex is in the fight of her life against the adults, who would use her, the survivors, who don't trust her, and the Changed, who would eat her alive. Welcome to Shadows, the second book in the haunting apocalyptic Ashes Trilogy: where no one is safe and humans may be the worst of the monsters.
-- "Journal"
About the Author :
Ilsa J. Bick is a child psychiatrist, as well as a film scholar, surgeon wannabe, former Air Force major, and an award-winning, best-selling author of short stories, e-books, and novels. She has written extensively in the Star Trek, Battletech, Mechwarrior: Dark Age, and Shadowrun universes. Her original stories have been featured in numerous anthologies, magazines and online venues. Ilsa's YA paranormal, Draw the Dark, was also a semifinalist for the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (as Stalag Winter). Ilsa currently lives with her family and other furry creatures in rural Wisconsin and across the street from the local Hebrew cemetery. One thing she loves about the neighbors: They're very quiet and come around for sugar only once in a blue moon.
Review :
Earth's few remaining normal teenagers struggle to survive in this gruesome, bloody post-apocalyptic sequel.
The world's gone completely to hell: All nonelderly adults are dead, and most teenagers are Changed into zombielike feral children who eat humans alive. Survivors huddle into protective enclaves and protect themselves with deadly force. Resolving the cliffhanger ending of Ashes (2011)--Alex flees from the strangely religious community of Rule only to stumble into the bone-strewn larder of a pack of Changed--takes 100 pages to resolve, mostly due to the shifts in perspective to other un-Changed teenagers driving these action-packed short chapters. Alex is a prisoner of the Changed, and as they drive her through the snowy wilderness, she sees that their behavior is, disturbingly, growing less feral: They use guns, make uniforms and practice profitless cruelties. The remaining adults seem nearly as cruel, practicing Josef Mengele-style experiments and killing children to cover ancient political feuds. Sometimes it seems like the only difference is that the Changed eat their prey, devouring them in sensuously described murder and torture scenes packed with fountaining blood and festooned guts. Nearly every chapter ends with a cliffhanger, keeping the horror appropriately unending: 'And then Spider squeezed the trigger.' 'The knife hacked down with a whir.' 'And then, it moved.'
Plenty of mysteries and betrayals set up the trilogy's forthcoming conclusion, which fans will eagerly await. --Kirkus Reviews
-- "Journal"
In this sequel to the nail-biting horror of Ashes (BCCB 10/11), Alex must face the hard truth that the supposedly good people of Rule, a small enclave of those who survived the electromagnetic pulse that killed much of the world's population, are actually feeding the Changed (teenagers who have been transformed into mute cannibals by the same pulse). Elsewhere, Tom has recovered in the wilderness and searches for Alex as he tries to avoid the bounty hunters looking for the Spared; Peter is not so lucky, and ends up in the hands of Finn, whose sadistic experiments might have some utility if he weren't bat-guano crazy. Meanwhile, Chris and Lena have also escaped Rule, but their path through Changed territory is threaded with danger. Bick amps up both the gore and the suspense in an already hair-raising, edgy thriller series, and her prose style has grown even richer, offering imagery that is disturbingly vivid and horrifically, perversely beautiful at times. She also deepens and complicates the motivational base by introducing a fraught history of intergenerational conflict and corruption as well as the possibility that main characters, including Alex and Lena, are still vulnerable to having their status change from Spared to Changed. Readers should be warned to clear their calendars before they pick this up, because they won't be doing much of anything else until they turn the last, cliff-hanging page. --The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
-- "Journal"
