City of Savages
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
“Red Dawn meets Escape from New York and The Hunger Games” (Booklist) in an action-packed dystopian fantasy filled with “prose [that] is gorgeous and brilliant” and “tells a satisfyingly dark tale through alternating the two sisters’ points of view” (VOYA, starred review).
It’s been nearly two decades since the Red Allies first attacked New York, and Manhattan is now a prisoner-of-war camp, ruled by Rolladin and her brutal, impulsive warlords. For Skyler Miller, Manhattan is a cage that keeps her from the world beyond the city’s borders. But for Sky’s younger sister, Phee, the POW camp is a dangerous playground of possibility, and the only home she’d ever want.
When Sky and Phee discover their mom’s hidden journal from the war’s outbreak, they both realize there’s more to Manhattan—and their mother—than either of them had ever imagined. And after a group of strangers arrives at the annual POW census, the girls begin to uncover the island’s long-kept secrets. The strangers hail from England, a country supposedly destroyed by the Red Allies, and Rolladin’s lies about Manhattan’s captivity begin to unravel.
Hungry for the truth, the sisters set a series of events in motion that end in the death of one of Rolladin’s guards. Now they’re outlaws, forced to join the strange Englishmen on an escape mission through Manhattan. Their flight takes them into subways haunted by cannibals, into the arms of a sadistic cult in the city’s Meatpacking District and, through the pages of their mom’s old journal, into the island’s dark and shocking past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There are plenty of heart-pounding moments in Kelly's debut, and an abundance of vividly imagined details bring post-apocalyptic New York City to searing life. But the biggest risk is not one that the characters take it's Kelly's bold spotlighting of the bonds between women. Sky and her younger sister, Phee, were raised in isolation by their fierce, reticent mother. Now they scrape together a subsistence living in the concrete shells of the damaged city. Winter forces them into temporary community with fellow survivors in Central Park, where the despot Rolladin enforces the rules at whim. The humans who have survived disaster neither dominate nor submit to the new landscape, and men and women compete as equal players and equal threats. Phee and Sky's alternation of first-person, present-tense narration is unusual and effective as they mutually discover their history, survive their present, and grab for a future that acknowledges their loving sororal relationship. This bold choice for Saga's launch lineup puts both the imprint and the author on track for idiosyncratic success.
