Doomsday Kids 3: Amaranth's Return - A Review

With book 3 in the Doomsday Kids series, Folan has truly revved up the tension and the stakes.

I have previously reviewed Book 1 and Book 2, and it's safe to say that I've become absolutely hooked.
In fact, when I, after an agonising wait, got this instalment through, I tore through it in just a few hours. Who needs sleep anyway? This was just a few weeks ago, and already I have read it again. And even though I knew what was going to happen, it still gripped me as much as the first time around.

One thing I absolutely love in this series is how each book focuses on a different character and manages to refine them into multi-faceted beings that live and breathe and love and ache and fight and survive and fail in your head. Not that the other instalments don't characterise them enough, but in this format you really get the whole gist.

This time, the story is told from Amaranth’s point of view, the troubled, rebellious outcast with a dark past – and finally we learn where she came from, the demons she is fighting, her previous history with the other characters, and how it has shaped her into the person she is now, explaining all her erratic and angry behaviour. Yet there is no cliché to her at all.
 

           "Amaranth's Return" has some seriously dark undertones, reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a new level of grit and maturity that will make this book perfect reading for adults as well, showing what humans on the edge of survival can be truly capable of. There is no whitewash, no light version of the post-apocalypse. There were a few times when I had to put the book down and catch my breath. And if I had had any doubts in book 1 whether a postnuclear world had been “adequately” described in terms of how horrific it will be, those doubts are gone. Amaranth and Rod, who has been reduced to a pitiful shadow of his former self by radiation sickness, are on their way to find out if Rod's mother has survived, facing a world which makes their mountain place look like a holiday camp. Outside the bubble of their well-prepped shelter, as inadequate as it may have seemed to them at first, the outer world has well and truly gone down the toilet. Humans have been reduced to feral creatures out of sheer need to survive. Even the more organised groups have lost all their humanity.
It’s an equally  horrific and heartbreaking world, impossible for a reader to abandon or forget. There is cannibalism, a sinister, cultish commune, and a climatic moment of true cosmic horror. But there is also bravery, despite the tensions tightening bonds between – of all people – Wasserman and Amaranth, an old character returning and a new character being introduced. By the end you will quite possibly be bawling, over someone you never thought you'd care so much about.            

           It’s rare that I have been so emotionally involved in something that is (misleadingly) classed as teen fiction. This is quite possibly some of the best self-published fiction I have ever read, along with Hugh Howey’s Silo trilogy and Andy Weir’s The Martian. I have worked as a bookseller and reviewer for years and have seen much less deserving writing receive publishers’ attentions… in fact, I want to slap them silly for not headhunting Karyn Langhorne Folan.

All of it is written in such a fantastic descriptive way that the story unfolds like a film in your head… a film that will leave you quite possibly pumped with adrenaline and your nails bitten to the quick.

And again the story ends with a magnificent cliffhanger that makes you want to scream in frustration that you have to wait for the next instalment.

But at least it's coming. At least it's coming!

Not reading this is NOT an option!

 Lots of booky love,

 

Patty :)