Exodus

It’s 2100 and Mara’s island home has been steadily shrinking for years with the melting of the polar ice caps and the rising of the oceans – very soon, there will be nothing left. Mara learns of a nearby sky city called New Mungo via her cyber adventures on the “weave” and convinces her fellow islanders to set sail for this beacon of hope. But when they arrive, they are faced with a huge barrier wall, a desperate refugee camp and a police force that brutally shoots at approaching boats. If New Mungo won’t take them in, where will they go?

EXODUS is a very ambitious novel with 3 very distinct and stunningly realized settings: a drowning island in the North Atlantic, the high-tech sky city of New Mungo, and a shadow world show more beneath New Mungo where a few relics of the past, including a cathedral and a university, still exist.

Mara is the kind of fearless and determined teen necessary for such a novel. She’s a leader wherever she goes, and even the subject of a mysterious prophecy known as “the stone telling” which tells of a girl who leads victims of the rising sea level to salvation.

On the surface, it’s a great action story about surviving at any cost. Dig a little deeper and you are keenly aware of what those costs are. When you can’t save everyone, who do you choose to save? And then, how do you live with your choice? If you are the architects of New Mungo, you do it by banishing the past and living for the “power of now”. If you are a resident of the shadow world, you do it by burying the past, and fervently believing that an outside force will come someday to set things right. And if you are Mara…well, that’s something I’m sure the sequels ZENITH (out now) and AURORA (no set release date) will explore. show less

Summary: In 2100, the Earth's ice caps have melted, the oceans have risen, and month-long fierce storms are the norm. The inhabitants of the tiny village island of Wing have moved further and further uphill as the seas rise, but there's no longer anywhere else to go. Fifteen-year Mara believes she has evidence of great sky cities built somewhere in the south, and even though the villagers are skeptical, they have no other choice - they head for the one they believe to be closest. However, once they get there, they find that the high-tech city has equally high security, and it isn't accepting new refugees. Now, it seems as though it will be up to Mara to find a way to get inside the city, and somehow save her people... and maybe the show more whole of humanity.

Review: I can't quite decide if this book is horrifically frightening, or upliftingly hopeful. Both, probably. Bertagna's vision of the future is terrifyingly plausible - indeed, she points out, it's already started, and we are standing on the precipice of that future. At the same time, Bertagna doesn't slip into hopelessness, or start lecturing us about how badly we're screwing up the planet - she just presents her vision of the future as she sees it, and I wound up spending a lot of the book asking myself "Is this inevitable? What will we do if this happens? What can we do to keep this from happening?" I think this book should be required reading in every freshman lit class in the world for exactly that reason - because it makes you think, and turns global warming from something that only Al Gore worries about into something much more immediate and personal.

I don't mean to give the impression that this is exclusively a "message" book - far from it. The story itself is very absorbing, and well-told, with sympathetic characters, lots of interesting twists and turns, and plenty of action. Like Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy, on the surface level it reads as an exciting action story, with all of the social commentary tucked down in the cracks - not so much that you have to go hunting for it, but just enough that it's enjoyable on a variety of levels. I wasn't blown out of the water (heh, sorry) by the writing - I tend not to like books written in the present tense without a clear reason for it, and while I can usually tune it out, there were times when it was intrusively noticeable - but for the most part, it was innocuous. Anyways, this isn't a book you should read for the writing, it's a book you should read for the story - and for the message. 4 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: If you liked Uglies, you'll find this one in much the same vein. For everyone else, I'd still recommend giving this one a shot: it's a highly entertaining and compulsively readable story on an interesting - and important - topic. show less

A very readable story, that posits a world devastated by the floods and storms that follow the melting of the polar icecaps, and poses a number of disconcerting questions as we follow a young girl's coming of age and attempt to improve circumstances for herself and her society.

If circumstances forced us to try to rebuild our society from the ground up, I wondered on reading this book, would we end up making the same mistakes all over again? To what extent are we as people culpable for the actions of our government?

Bertagna sensitively and thought-provokingly demonstrates the way in which fear for our own continued well-being can blunt our ability to feel empathy and compassion for others, and the way in which growing up in a society show more that is relatively well-off can leave people preoccupied with their own concerns and prevent them from seeing the bigger picture.

An enjoyable and thought-provoking read, and (it probably should be added) nowhere near as preachy as this review probably makes it sound!! show less

Exodus is set in the year 2099, when the Earth has all but drowned and only a few islands remain habitable. Mara is confined to her fast-disappearing island home of Wing, which is ravaged by fierce storms and an ever-dwindling supply of food, and where every night she escapes into a virtual world known as the Weave. One night, she discovers ‘proof’ of the mythical Sky Cities – entire cities that rose into the sky and kept their inhabitants safe from the flooded world below – and sets about convincing everyone of their existence, keeping secret the fact that she only discovered their existence from a talking fox, who may or may not be an enemy… She convinces the community to set sail on a terrifyingly dangerous journey to find show more these Sky Cities; but what will they find there?

I really wasn’t sure about this book at first – the blurb made it sound a teensy bit corny and when I started reading it, there wasn’t much of a story (in fact, the story doesn’t really kick off until about 75 pages to the end) and the present tense in which it is written takes a bit of getting used to – but I was intrigued by this incredibly detailed future that Bertagna had created and was interested to know what would happen when the story did kick off; and boy, am I glad I did! Not to say that there was no story before the ‘pick up the pace’ point – the book was beautifully written throughout and those pages were quite vital to the plot of the story, as well as essential in making connections with the characters in the book.

The characters are all really well developed and you genuinely care about them when horrible things happen to them. You also really feel for them and their situation – after all, the book in set just 90 years away, in a world that struggles to survive because of extreme flooding; a world that is frighteningly likely to happen and it could be our great-grandchildren that live in the nightmare-world, making it an eye-opening, powerful read.

An exceedingly beautifully written and thought-provoking read. I cannot wait to read the rest of the trilogy! show less

In less than a hundred years, all the damage we've done to the Earth will catch up to us. All the trees we've chopped down will contribute to the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, speeding the greenhouse effect and melting the polar ice caps. The planet is drowning.

This is the bleak reality of Mara's island community: the sea is rising, and the people on Wing are running out of high ground. Mara has been studying, though, digging through the Weave on her outdated computer, and has found evidence of a new world built high above the ocean. If her people are to survive, they need to move there. But even after the perilous journey is over, they still can't make it past the wall.

This novel was more engrossing than I was prepared show more to give it credit for--the plot moves slowly, but then you look up and realize it's been an hour and 70 pages have flown by. Some elements are telegraphed right from the beginning (at least for anyone who's ever read a book)--will Mara find a way in?--but even the predictable plot points are ... well, not surprising, but somehow unexpected? They don't feel as inevitable as you'd expect. Despite being in the "greatness thrust upon her" category, Mara is a strong leader with a good heart. I can say roughly the same for the novel. show less

In the year 2100 the Earth's polar ice caps have melted. The steadily rising ocean waters first envelop the cities of Tokyo and New York, setting off international panic as the inundation shows no sign of receding. Global warming has conjured storm after storm, hurricanes continually battering what remains of inhabited lands. On the island of Wing, fifteen year old Mara has spent much of her life indoors behind shuttered windows with her family, wondering how long her shelter can withstand the gale force winds. The sun is a rarity, and much of her days are spent in darkness with the wind whipping outside.

As the waters continue to rise, Mara urges the other islanders to set sail for the "New World" which she has seen in a holographic, show more advanced version of the Internet known as the Weave. This New World is a city that rises into the sky, far above the deluge. Out on the violent open sea, Mara is separated from her family and many of the other islanders. When she arrives at the city in the sky she is part of a fleet of refugee ships that are blocked from entering by huge walls, and hunted by armed police. Racked with guilt for leading her fellow islanders into a bobbing horde of pestilence and death, Mara decides she must find a way in, to save herself and her fellow sojourners...

While the apocalyptic storyline would seem to be rather gripping, and the dystopian setting engaging, the character of Mara ultimately turned my thumb downward for Exodus. Steadily unsure of herself, Mara is in a continuous state of doubt. While this may be a normal character trait for some - the way that Bertagna portrays it grows wearisome - and whiny. The length of the book, at 325 pages, is stretched even further by passages that are seemingly scooped up from one chapter and dropped into the next. It is one thing to illuminate a character's interior conversation, but it is another to have the character repeat the same interior conversation every ten pages. Like the "New World," Exodus is built on a towering foundation for a fantasy, but it is ultimately too airy to relate to its "hero." show less

So I literally started this last night and stayed up late to finish it! Exodus is probably a book that I wouldn't have picked up usually, because I'm not hugely into fantasy. I'm glad I read it because even though I'm not a huge fan because the novel covered so many other genres, including history, technology, futurology (that's a word..right?) and something very close to my heart (does that sound cheesy?), poetry.

It's the year 2100. Our protagonist is Mara Bell and she lives on the island of Wing, which is gradually drowning because of the floods. After meeting a strange cyber 'fox' in her Cyberwiz (which is like a sort of computer/virtual world-thingy) Mara convinces everyone to move to another island, the New World, because it's show more clear that it's not long until the whole of Wing is flooded and the inhabitants wiped out. But once they get there, it turns out that there's too many people there already and Mara must suffer watching her neighbours slowly die out of hunger, and then there's the problem that she was separated from her parents, and her little brother.

She's decided she needs to do something, and fast, because she can't sit and be witness to the death of her best friend. And so Mara sets of on an adventure to get help. On her way, she meets with a group of people called the 'Treenesters' and is introduced to a prophecy involving none other than herself..

The start was quite slow for me, and I have to admit that before I actually sat down properly to read it yesterday, I'd read the first page on several occasions and could not get into it. Since I got the book about a month ago, I was pretty excited to read it because it sounded different from anything I'd read before and I'd heard that it was something really special. But about one hundred pages in..I was wondering if this was the same book everybody was talking about.

However, I had to continue reading, because I was determined to find the best in Exodus. Come the second half of the book, things started to get a little exciting..it was like somebody had waved a magic wand, because there was this.. spark in the atmosphere and I found I couldn't take my eyes away from the page.

I have to give credit to Bertagna where credit is due, because she presents us with some of the most extraordinary settings and descriptions, even though some of it it at the beginning might have been what put me off. Her depiction of the world that is struggling to survive in such extreme conditions is fascinating, it made me think about what could quite possibly be us in a number of years, you never actually know.

Mara is confident and clever, but she doesn't notice these qualities in herself, instead believing that she is a bit self-centred because it was her actions that caused some of the horrible events to occur in the book. There was a lot hanging on her shoulders, but it it took was her to have faith in herself and her actions to relieve that tension; and I'm happy to say that Mara became stronger throughout the course of the book and it really showed. The characters were all very well-developed, and extremely likeable, especially Gorbal! He was a funny one! And Fox..hmm..I would have liked to get to know him a little better though, since Mara and him were in love with each other.

Exodus is a brilliant self-discovery story; imaginative and thought-provoking, a truly riveting read. Looking forward to reading Zenith! show less