Alex is a great character – smart and resourceful.

Who is trustworthy and how can we be sure they don’t just have a personal agenda? Ashes has a crazy mythology: part religious fanaticism, part survival of the fittest.Īs Alex tries to figure out what has happened to the world…and herself (because she isn’t the same anymore either), Bick continues to introduce new perils and characters we must decide – as must Alex – whether or not we can trust.Īshes is the first book in a trilogy and I will definitely be continuing on with the series. What does it mean to be free, for example. Like that book, Bick’s novel stretches out beyond the confines of teen against supernatural/fantasy/strange forces/etc and starts to tackle some other questions. As the story went on, it did make me think about Patrick Ness’s novel The Knife of Never Letting Go a little. I think boys will especially love it because it really has a gross-out factor. This is one of those no-holds-barred works of fiction that teens will love. For one thing, she’s completely cut off from the rest of the world. But these flesh eating teens aren’t the only thing Alex has to contend with. With a grunt, the boy plunged his fist into the woman’s abdomen and rooted around before coming back up with a drippy fistful of something liverish and soft enough that Alex could hear the squelch as the meaty thing oozed between his fists.

Splashes of blood smeared their mouths and dripped over their chins like runny clown’s makeup. When she and Ellie stumble into a camp site, this is what Alex sees:

By page 25, Jack is dead and Alex and Ellie are running for their lives.īy page 72 both Alex and the reader know they aren’t in Kansas anymore. Ellie is eight and is clearly not happy to be tramping through the woods. She’s decided not to do any more of the experimental treatments for her brain tumor – so she’s left her Aunt Hannah and headed to Waucamaw Wilderness in Michigan to clear her head and scatter the ashes of her parents, who had been killed in a helicopter crash.Īlex is enjoying the solitude of the woods until Jack, his granddaughter, Ellie and their dog Mina happen by. And she has “a brain tumor the size of a tennis ball” lodged in her head.Īlex is on the run, sort of. “…once you’ve made up your mind, there’s no talking to you,” she says. We learn quite a lot about the feisty heroine, Alex, in the prologue of Ilsa J.

Ashes ilsa bick