The clearing has begun. Children across the country are disappearing. And I'm the only one who can stop it...
There was a time when our world was open and free. Those days seem like something out of a dream. Now, I live in a walled community, protected by guards from the wilderness beyond. Everything felt safe, until the last few years. That's when the rumours started. And then I saw with my own eyes they were true...
Children are being taken all over the country. Snatched from their homes, never to be seen again. As I look up at the stormy sky beyond the Perimeter fence, I realise I have to do something. I may only be seventeen, but I know where all those children are.
James Grey and his terrifying followers are hiding the missing ones in an old fortress. They've been training them to fight, creating an army that's growing stronger day by day. My best friend Luc is by my side. Everything seems strange between us, since the night we kissed, but he's pledged to help me in my quest to stop this madness.
Although fighting to end the clearing means returning to the last place on earth I ever want to go. It means allowing the chilling hooded figures to take us too. Luc and I are willing to sacrifice our own freedom in order to save so many others... but will we succeed?
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(@SecondSkyBooks, 22 August 2023, e-galley, 306 pages, ARC from the publisher via @NetGalley)
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I loved The Clearing just as much as I loved the first book Outside. This picks up soon after the first book, with events just briefly touched on in Outside coming full circle. The first book hints that some iffy bloke called James Grey is kidnapping kids and brainwashing them. The Clearing focuses on James Grey's dangerous insanity and the mania of his obsessive 'followers' who are becoming an increasing threat. Like the first book, one of the best things about The Clearing which makes it stand out from other dystopian fiction is that the events which ended the world are just a backdrop, as are how the survivors survive or not. The Clearing takes events that could happen anywhere but uses a dystopian world as the backdrop for extra craziness. I look forward to the final book in the trilogy, The Perimeter.
5/5
Click here for my review of the 1st book, Outside
Click here for my review of the 3rd book, The Perimeter