Pure

Starred review from November 14, 2011
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.

January 15, 2012
Us 99 percenters will live outside the gates come the future, and it won't be pretty--especially once the nukes start popping. Baggott (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!

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September 15, 2011

The author of fiction, poetry, and children's books, Baggott here offers the first in a postapocalyptic trilogy being compared to Justin Cronin's The Passage and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games. After the Detonations, the burned and scarred survivors must turn themselves over to the authorities at age 16, to become either soldiers or live targets. Now 16 and (understandably) on the run, Pressia encounters Partridge, one of the Pures--so-called because they were inside the Dome during the Detonations and hence are undamaged. Partridge has just left the Dome's safety, having learned that his mother might be outside, still alive. This book is really building (film rights went to the Twilight producers); don't miss.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2011
Thanks to something called the Detonations, civilization has been destroyed (yes, again!). Survivors are horribly burned and scarred anda neat touchfused 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 backhis 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)