Book Review: Exodus by Julie Bertagna

It’s 2100 and Mara’s island home has been steadily shrinking for years with the melting of the polar ice caps and the rising of the oceans – very soon, there will be nothing left. Mara learns of a nearby sky city called New Mungo via her cyber adventures on the “weave” and convinces her fellow islanders to set sail for this beacon of hope. But when they arrive, they are faced with a huge barrier wall, a desperate refugee camp and a police force that brutally shoots at approaching boats. If New Mungo won’t take them in, where will they go?

EXODUS is a very ambitious novel with 3 very distinct and stunningly realized settings: a drowning island in the North Atlantic, the high-tech sky city of New Mungo, and a shadow world beneath New Mungo where a few relics of the past, including a cathedral and a university, still exist.

Mara is the kind of fearless and determined teen necessary for such a novel. She’s a leader wherever she goes, and even the subject of a mysterious prophecy known as “the stone telling” which tells of a girl who leads victims of the rising sea level to salvation.

On the surface, it’s a great action story about surviving at any cost. Dig a little deeper and you are keenly aware of what those costs are. When you can’t save everyone, who do you choose to save? And then, how do you live with your choice? If you are the architects of New Mungo, you do it by banishing the past and living for the “power of now”. If you are a resident of the shadow world, you do it by burying the past, and fervently believing that an outside force will come someday to set things right. And if you are Mara…well, that’s something I’m sure the sequels ZENITH (out now) and AURORA (no set release date) will explore.

EXODUS is available in paperback. Find out more about it and the rest of the series at the author’s website.

My Rating – 4 Zombie Chickens: An Excellent Example of the Dystopian Genre

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