Blood Red Road

[sawyl]

I picked up Moira Young's Blood Red Road on impulse — such are the delights of ebooks — after reading a couple of positive reviews. Although I really enjoyed the book as a whole, I found it slightly tough going at first and I took a week long sabbatical around the mid-point to allow myself time to recover.

Life in Silverlake hasn't exactly been easy for Saba. Their life is a constant struggle, lake is dying, her father has become increasingly obsessed with astrology, and she blames her younger sister Emmi for the death of their mother. The only positive in Saba's angry, post-apocalyptic world is her twin brother Lugh. So when a group of strange men kill her father and kidnap Lugh, Saba is completely determined to get her brother back, no matter what the costs.

Hairing off in pursuit of her missing brother Saba soon arrives in the misnamed Hopetown, where she finds herself caught up in the local cage fighting scene where her anger and aggression quickly earn her the nickname of the Angel of Death. But when she learns from a fellow fighter that the King has plans for Lugh and that she only has until mid-summer — a couple of weeks away — to save him, Saba realises that she needs to escape from the cages and get back on the trail just as quickly as she can.

The post-apocalyptic world of Blood Red Road feels like it is part western and part Mad Max. The setting is clearly post-warming — old, extinct, industrial humanity are referred to as Wreckers — where might is right, where the King rules through a combination of tyranny and drugs, and where literacy is a rare commodity — a fact emphasized by Saba's first-person narrative, with its phonetic spelling. There even hints of the fantastic, in the form of Saba's heartstone, her father's possibly prophetic dreams, and the King's mid-summer ritual. But none of these are major features of the setting and they're so liminal that they might simply be chance or wishful thinking.

Although I enjoyed the book, I initially found Saba a tough character to like. Young and Spiky and angry, she lashes out at everyone around her both physically and verbally; she never seems to have a kind word for Emmi and tries to ditch her at every possible opportunity, despite being Emmi's only available relative; and when helped out of a tight spot by others, she's supremely ungrateful. But for all that, it's clear why Saba is the way she is. She's had a tough life and, in the past, she's always been able to depend on Lugh to do the things that she can't or won't do: to be the one who's nice to Emmi, the one who is levelheaded and who takes the trouble to maintain the house. And as time goes on and she meets more people and come to realise that she really does care for Emmi, Saba really grows as a character to the point where she's almost likable and it's possible to see why the people she meets choose to follow her.