Apocalyptic Adventures for All Kinds of Kids!
Embark on a perilous survival adventure with a misfit bunch of young people thrown together after the greatest disaster of all time: a nuclear holocaust.
Karyn Langhorne Folan graduated from Harvard Law School and after practicing and teaching law for several years, decided to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. She is the author of twenty-one books and counting, including three young adult titles for the popular Bluford High series, four romance novels, several works of nonfiction. She has also been the ghostwriter for personalities in the entertainment and music industries. She is married and has two daughters.
The idea for The Doomsday Kids was the result of a mash-up of influences and ideas in pop culture: the popularity of the TV show, Doomsday Preppers, the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012 and the fears many people had that the world would end then, and the ongoing “war against terror” were all influences. So were The Hunger Games and Divergent books. But a bigger influence to Ms. Folan were every day teens who enjoyed those books but felt unrepresented in the imagined worlds of the future where everyone was heroic, good-looking and usually, white.
“That’s just not the world—or at least not where I live,” Mrs. Folan says. “The communities around author-family-500Washington, DC are very culturally diverse and my kids go to school with kids from every religion, every race and every nation in the world. Our own family is the United Nations: my husband is Irish American, I’m African American. My elder daughter’s father is black and Pacific Islander, so she’s part Asian! All of those influences make us who we are.”
“I wanted to write a science fiction book series that featured stories that featured real diversity. I wanted to tell those stories from the points of view of all different kinds of kids,” she continued. “I wanted black kids and white kids, Asian kids and Latino kids, fat kids and athletes, kids with physical limitations and kids with emotional ones. In short, I really wanted to take some of the real kids I know—my daughters’ multicultural cast of friends— and drop them into a survival situation. They don’t have super powers. They’re just kids, separated from their families by the ultimate tragedy, finding hope and family in each other.”
The result was The Doomsday Kids book series.
Dying of radiation poisoning, Rod Wasserman has one last wish: to return to the Wasteland of Washington DC to see if there’s any hope that his mother has survived the nuclear blast.
Amaranth Jones has a last wish, too: for the chance to redeem herself. In order to do it, she must leave Liam Harper and her friends at the Mountain Place behind. So when she discovers Rod packing to leave, she insists on joining him— whether he wants her company or not.
On their perilous adventure back to ground zero, the two teens confront the horrors of their post-apocalyptic world. Food and water are scarce, human life has little meaning and some desperate survivors have surrendered to the ultimate inhumanity: cannibalism. Threatened by weather, other survivors and their own demons, Amaranth and Rod must put aside their rocky history or they will die. But as Rod grows weaker, Amaranth confronts her darkest memories. How far will she go to help Rod achieve his last wish? And if they find Rod’s mother, can the three of them make it back to the Mountain Place alive?
This is the third book in The Doomsday Kids series.
Narrated by Amaranth, and featuring: Rod and Jax.
This book was amazing. The writing was excellent, character development excellent… a great dystopian read.
Plenty of action and suspense. The pacing of the book kept the tension high and there were enough plot twists to keep you off balance and wondering what was going to happen next.