Above

November 25, 2013
Morley (Come Sunday) scores with an audacious page-turner. Blythe Hollowell is only 16 when she’s kidnapped and taken to live in an abandoned missile silo by Dobbs, a local conspiracy theorist, who has chosen her to help him repopulate the world after end times. If the premise and some of the concepts initially owe too great a debt to Emma Donoghue’s Room, the specifics of life underground and Blythe’s coping mechanisms—in particular, her touching habit of using memories to teach herself, as she gets older in captivity, how to be an adult—quickly set it apart. At first Blythe dreams of escape and resists Dobbs, but as the years pass, she weakens, and when she bears a son, Adam, and Dobbs becomes increasingly unpredictable, she resigns herself to life in captivity. Time passes without losing momentum, and soon Adam turns 15, questioning Dobbs’s authority and demanding to go into the world they call Above. In a series of gripping twists, Morley elevates the complexities of Blythe and Adam’s situation, deepening the themes of survival and dependence. The tension diffuses toward the end, but the majority of the book is a stellar and surprising ride.

January 1, 2014
South Africa-born Morley makes a wild U-turn from the semiautobiographical Come Sunday (2009) to write a captivity novel that morphs into a post-apocalyptic adventure. Blythe is abducted at age 16 by Dobbs, a creepy survivalist who insists he's saving her from the imminent Armageddon. She spends 18 years below ground in an abandoned missile silo near her Kansas home, bearing a son, Adam, who is 15 when Blythe kills Dobbs with a crochet needle and emerges Above to find that there actually was a disaster: The meltdown of 90 nuclear reactors some 15 years ago killed off most of the global population and left the rest deformed by radiation. In a world where most babies are Defectives, genetically sound Adam is a hot commodity; with the help of a sympathetic employee, he and Blythe escape the sinister facility planning to harvest his sperm and travel across the devastated landscape in search of her family. This powerful material suffers from the imperfect integration of its component parts. More than half the novel chronicles Blythe's years in the silo--it's Room told from the mother's point of view but without Emma Donoghue's stylistic and thematic mastery. Moving episodically through 18 years, the narrative throws out shards of insight into the evolution of Blythe's relationship with Dobbs and her strategies to protect Adam, but they never cohere into a full picture. Blythe's and Adam's initial post-silo wanderings nicely render her growing awareness that something is very wrong Above, but they occupy too many pages given the limited amount of space Morley has left herself to explore the new reality they must cope with. The excellent scenes following their escape, which show a shattered humanity trying to rebuild in small communities of damaged people, require more development to make the denouement in Blythe's ruined hometown truly meaningful, though it's quite moving nonetheless. A whole host of interesting ideas stuffed into a lopsided structure that doesn't support the author's high ambitions. Still, very intriguing and provocative.

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February 15, 2014

Blythe Hallowell is 16 when she's abducted by school librarian Dobbs Hordin, a survivalist who believes the apocalypse is imminent. Dobbs hides Blythe in an abandoned missile silo where they will ride out the end of the world, emerge, and restart the human race. As the years pass, Blythe must learn to cope with the crushing loneliness that comes as Dobbs leaves to gather supplies and she is left alone for days and weeks at a time. After her son, Adam, is born, she seems to give up on escaping and focuses on teaching her son about a world he's only seen in books. After 17 years of captivity, Blythe and Adam reenter a world that has changed more than either of them could ever have imagined. VERDICT Morley (Come Sunday) tells a compelling story that builds suspense. While the truth of Dobbs's predictions may not surprise all readers, Morley's vision of a postapocalyptic Kansas is haunting enough to make for a true page-turner. Half abduction story (like Emma Donoghue's Room), half dystopian fiction, this novel will appeal to fans of both. [Library marketing.]--Portia Kapraun, Monticello-Union Twp. P.L., IN

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2014
Kidnapped on her way home from a summer festival in her corn-country hamlet of Eudora, Kansas, 16-year-old Blythe Hallowell spends the next two decades of her life in an abandoned Cold War-era missile silo, dozens of feet underground. Her abductor, high-school librarian Dobbs Hordin, is a conspiracy theory du jour survivalist who has chosen Blythe to play Eve to his Adam when the apocalypse comes. Having outfitted the silo with all the building blocks for a new civilization, Blythe and Dobbs are left to play a deadly and protracted waiting game as one scenario for annihilation after another fails to occur. And then one day, well into middle age and accompanied by the teenage son she bore while in captivity, Blythe manages to escape her insane captor's grasp, only to find that one of Dobbs' worst-case predictions has actually come to pass. Morley crafts a menacingly sinister tale of imprisonment and eerily inventive story of survival that will appeal to fans of riveting psychological suspense and cut-throat dystopian fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)