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Summary
Summary
Julianna Baggott presents her beautifully written, riveting, breakout novel, PURE, the first volume in her new post-apocalypse thriller trilogy.
We know you are here, our brothers and sisters . . .
Pressia barely remembers the Detonations or much about life during the Before. In her sleeping cabinet behind the rubble of an old barbershop where she lives with her grandfather, she thinks about what is lost-how the world went from amusement parks, movie theaters, birthday parties, fathers and mothers . . . to ash and dust, scars, permanent burns, and fused, damaged bodies. And now, at an age when everyone is required to turn themselves over to the militia to either be trained as a soldier or, if they are too damaged and weak, to be used as live targets, Pressia can no longer pretend to be small. Pressia is on the run.
Burn a Pure and Breathe the Ash . . .
There are those who escaped the apocalypse unmarked. Pures. They are tucked safely inside the Dome that protects their healthy, superior bodies. Yet Partridge, whose father is one of the most influential men in the Dome, feels isolated and lonely. Different. He thinks about loss-maybe just because his family is broken; his father is emotionally distant; his brother killed himself; and his mother never made it inside their shelter. Or maybe it's his claustrophobia: his feeling that this Dome has become a swaddling of intensely rigid order. So when a slipped phrase suggests his mother might still be alive, Partridge risks his life to leave the Dome to find her.
When Pressia meets Partridge, their worlds shatter all over again.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Baggott's highly anticipated postapocalyptic horror novel, a dramatic shift from her lighthearted poetry, women's fiction (as Bridget Asher), and children's books, is a fascinating mix of stark, oppressive authoritarianism and grotesque anarchy. Like most survivors of the Detonations, teen Pressia is disfigured, a doll's head fused into the place where her hand should be. She's better off than people who were merged into each other, with animals, or even with the Earth itself, but she's also at risk of being drafted into the paramilitary Operation Sacred Revolution. The few who survived unscathed-known as "Pures"-live in the Domes, impenetrable arcologies where the few children are forced into rigid training and genetic enhancement. When Partridge, believing his mother to be alive in the wilderness, escapes from a Dome, he's rescued by Pressia. Along with a conspiracy theorist named Bradwell, they gradually discover dark secrets about events on both sides of the Dome walls. Baggott mixes brutality, occasional wry humor, and strong dialogue into an exemplar of the subgenre. Agent: Sobel Weber Associates. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
After a nuclear holocaust, the world is divided into the Pure and the Wretches. The former are the survivors, who live relatively safe, sanitised lives within a vast dome, while the latter exist in appalling hardship in a contaminated wasteland beyond the dome. Worse, the Wretches are fused to whatever objects were in their proximity at the moment of the atomic blast: protagonist Pressia Belze's right hand, for instance, is melded with a doll's head. It's a concept which jars at first, but then becomes a constant and poignant reminder of a world irretrievably lost. The narrative shifts between those inside the dome and those outside, as the two worlds inevitably come together. Baggott tells what might have been an overly grim tale with crystalline precision, offering a hint of hope in the novels to follow. Eric Brown's The Kings of Eternity is published by Solaris. - Eric Brown After a nuclear holocaust, the world is divided into the Pure and the Wretches. The former are the survivors, who live relatively safe, sanitised lives within a vast dome, while the latter exist in appalling hardship in a contaminated wasteland beyond the dome. - Eric Brown.
Kirkus Review
Girl Talk, 2001, etc.), author of fantasies and light comedies alike, takes a somber turn with her latest, which opens with an exceedingly ugly period "after the Detonations," a time when some people sicken and die from merely drinking the water and others' faces simply melt away, where "death is sometimes measured" in the rasping coughs of the survivors who have breathed the nuclear winter. Tucked inside the safety of the Dome, where a privileged few are sheltered, young Partridge is safe. Impudently, though, he steals out into that world to find his mother, or at least find out why she refused to leave the city and take cover with her family. Out there, 16-year-old Pressia is trying to keep out of the clutches of the ugly fascist order that has come into power in a time of emergency. It's a nasty bunch, given to playing games such as Death Spree, "used...to rid society of the weak," as one of the impromptu band of resisters formed by Pressia and Partridge says, adding, "It's really the only kind of sport around here, if you can call it a sport." That band roams the countryside, gathering knowledge and skills, dodging the many, many baddies and bad circumstances that threaten to do them in, making a fine hero quest among the ruins wrought by both bombs and "the Return to Civility and its legislation." Read between the lines, and the story acquires timely dimensions, though you need not do so to have good fun with the book. As fantasy novels tend to do, Baggott's tome labors under heavy influences--not just Tolkien, the lord of the genre, but also Rowling, comparisons with whom are inevitable. William Golding's and George Orwell's and even H.G. Wells' spirits hove into view from time to time, too. Yet Baggott is no mimic, and she successfully imagines and populates a whole world, which is the most rigorous test of a fantasy's success. It's a bonus that the hero of the piece is a young girl, which ought to serve as inspiration for more than a few readers. Whether Baggott's imagined world is one that you'd want to live in is another matter entirely, of course. Damned Detonations!]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Thanks to something called the Detonations, civilization has been destroyed (yes, again!). Survivors are horribly burned and scarred and a neat touch fused to whatever they happened to be near when the Detonations occurred. Thus, teenager Pressia has a doll's head for a hand; another major character, Bradwell, sports a row of birds on his back; and still another, El Capitan, also has extra baggage attached to his back his brother. Not surprisingly, these three (four, counting the brother) find each other amid the rubble and are joined by Partridge, a Pure, or unscarred survivor. (Partridge avoided being fused to anything by finding shelter in the Dome, which rises above the ruins like a shining city on a hill.) Baggott's postapocalyptic novel touches the usual bases (evil government, hints of revolution, etc.) and owes a great debt to Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games (2008) and lesser debts to Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) and even the Star Wars saga. Fans of the formula won't care and will wait raptly for volumes 2 and 3 of the promised trilogy.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SOMETIME in the unspecified future, a series of detonations has all but destroyed the world. A handpicked few were given refuge in the Dome, a high-tech bubble designed to withstand environmental disaster. Those left outside were not so fortunate. The intensity of the explosions not only devastated the landscape but changed forever those who survived it, fusing people with animals, with objects, with the earth. The lucky ones can still function. One young man has a slavering dog instead of a leg and has "learned how to walk with a quick, uneven limp." Another has several birds embedded in his back, their wings moving under his shirt. Some types are common enough to have been given names: the Groupies, drunk and vicious, have been bound into one massive body, while the feral Beasts are half man, half animal. The Dusts are barely human at all, monsters who have bonded to rocks and rubble, and who drag themselves out of the ground like living land mines to devour any creature that strays too close. Pressia is a beautiful, almond-eyed survivor who lives with her grandfather in a ruined barbershop. The Detonations hit when she was only 6, killing her Japanese mother, and now, besides the crescent scar around her left eye, she has a doll's head instead of a right hand. In a few days' time, on her 16th birthday, Pressia will be claimed by the OSR - once the search and rescue organization put together to aid survivors, now a paramilitary force that terrorizes the ravaged city. She will be "untaught to read" and either trained as a killer or, if her deformations are too debilitating, used for target practice. Her grandfather has built her a hiding place in a cabinet in the barbershop through which she can escape when the OSR comes knocking, but escape to where? Though there are rumors of an underground network that helps runaways, no one knows for sure. In the bombed-out dystopia of Julianna Baggott's "Pure" - the first book of a projected trilogy - no one ever comes back. Meanwhile, life in the Dome has its own privations. The younger inhabitants, known as Pures because of their unblemished bodies, are being subjected to a series of "codings," devised to enhance their physical capabilities and suppress potentially rebellious behavior. Partridge, however, despite being the son of a primary architect of the Dome, does not take well to reprogrammi ng. Oppressed by the claustrophobic regime, distanced from his cold father and grieving for his dead brother, he comes to believe that his mother, who he has been told is dead, may still be living on the outside. Determined to find her, he plots his escape. Beyond the Dome he meets Pressia, who saves him from marauding Groupies, and they decide to join forces. The film rights to "Pure" have already been sold, with a "Twilight" producer on board, and it's not hard to see why. Baggott's postapocalyptic world is realized to stunning cinematic effect, from the roofless barbershop (where "three combs float in a dust-covered glass tube filled with old cloudy blue water like they're suspended in time") to the Meltlands, one-time suburbs where children's plastic jungle gyms have liquefied into violently colored blobs like "warped sculptures," and the Deadlands, where the Dusts rise up to attack the living, "bringing with them what seems to be a hem of the earth." The fused and melded bodies of what the elite in the Dome call the "wretches" are each small chilling works of imaginative art. From the stranger's hand with its embedded keypad to the OSR operative whose younger brother is bonded to his back from the waist down in a "permanent piggyback ride," they speak directly to the technological wizardry of C.G.I. and 3-D. Pressia too is a heroine for the video game age. Unlike Winston Smith - the flawed hero of George Orwell's "1984," who in the end is defeated by an omnipotent state - Pressia is a manga heroine straight out of a comic book. Fearless, spirited, unflinching, she does not have it in her to act dishonorably. When faced with a dying boy caught in an agonizing trap, she cannot kill him, though her failure to do so may result in her own death. She admits to occasional weaknesses - she expresses a shameful fondness for the stylish OSR uniform, with a down jacket that feels "like walking inside warm risen bread" - but these are fleeting and never threaten her fundamental virtue. Her certainty and fortitude reflect the hopes of all adolescents who might ever find themselves in her situation, that if tested they would not be found wanting. The other teenage heroes are hardly more fallible. Partridge and Bradwell, the survivor son of revolutionary parents, might have moments of moodiness, but both are brave and steadfast, their instincts always true. The three of them bicker convincingly - Baggott has a sharp ear for the swagger and the vulnerabiiity of adolescence - but their moral compass is unwavering. There is good and there is evil, black and white. There is never any doubt about whose side we are on. THE great dystopian novels extrapolate from the ominous elements of contemporary society to a sinister, unchecked future, but "Pure" does not concern itself with a political context for its apocalypse. The Dome, and perhaps the Detonations too, are seemingly the brainchild of a handful of evil masterminds, Partridge's father among them, whose motivation may be the creation of a master race. It hardly matters. This is an apocalypse for a generation on the cusp of adulthood, who must choose between the authoritarian Dome, where safety comes at the price of parental tyranny, and the dark and dangerous wastelands of the world beyond, where, in pursuit of their freedom, they must face their greatest fears. The ordinary struggles of survival - food, sleep, sanitation - are of only passing concern. Adults have destroyed the planet. Now their children must battle for its redemption. This is a postapocalyptic narrative that owes at least as much to fairy tale and myth as it does to science fiction. The result is an old-fashioned adventure story that zips along at a brisk pace, the "Mad Max" landscape creating the backdrop for a succession of violent confrontations in which the stakes are satisfyingly high. What lifts "Pure" from the glut of blood-spattered young adult fiction is not the story Baggott tells but the exquisite precision of her prose. Late in the novel, a character remarks that despite the grotesque deformities of the survivors, "there's beauty in their scars and fusings because they are signs of their survival, which is a beautiful thing, if you think about it." Baggott can find a kind of beauty even in the woman whose pearl necklace, now part of her skin, resembles "a strand of perfectly shaped tumors." This novel may score more highly for entertainment than edification, but it is a treasury of such images, discomfiting and unforgettable. Clare Clark is the author of three novels, including, most recently, "Savage Lands."
Library Journal Review
In a creepy dystopian future, the detonation of nanotechnology bombs causes people to fuse with whatever was near them during the explosion-animals, other people, or, sometimes, objects. Since the blast, the unaffected "Pures" live inside the Dome in isolation and under rigid control. In swirling ash and constant fear, the misshapen "Wretches" live outside, eking out meager existences, hiding from the local militia, and plotting to attack the Dome. Partridge the Pure wants to find his mother and the truth about his past. Pressia the Wretch seeks safety and salvation. When the two meet, they find something else entirely. Baggott's imagery is matchless in this freakish and compelling tale of love and revolution. A full-cast narration (Khristine Hvam, Joshua Swanson, Kevin T. Collins, and Casey Holloway) transports the listener thoroughly into Baggott's imaginative and substantial details. VERDICT A sure hit for fans of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games and Stephenie Meyer's The Host. [The Grand Central pb will publish in December.-Ed.]-Terry Ann Lawler, Phoenix P.L. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.