Ashes (Ashes Trilogy Series #1)

by Ilsa J. Bick

Overview

An electromagnetic pulse flashes across the sky, destroying every electronic device, wiping out every computerized system, and killing billions. When it happens, Alex was hiking in the woods to say good-bye to her dead parents and her personal demons. Now desperate to find out what happened after the pulse crushes her to the ground, Alex meets up with Tom—a young soldier—and Ellie, a girl whose grandfather was killed by the EMP. For this improvised family and the others who are spared, it's now a question of who can be trusted and who is no longer human.

Author Ilsa J. Bick crafts a terrifying and thrilling novel about a world that could be ours at any moment, where those left standing must learn what it means not just to survive, but to live amidst the devastation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781606843857
Publisher:	Lerner Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/28/2012
Series:	Ashes Trilogy Series , #1
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.20(d)
Lexile:	HL730L (what's this?)
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

About the Author

Ilsa J. Bick is a child psychiatrist, as well as a film scholar, surgeon wannabe, former Air Force major, and an award-winning, best-selling author of short stories, e-books, and novels. She has written extensively in the Star Trek, Battletech, Mechwarrior: Dark Age, and Shadowrun universes. Her original stories have been featured in numerous anthologies, magazines and online venues.  Ilsa's YA paranormal, Draw the Dark, was also a semifinalist for the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (as Stalag Winter).  Ilsa currently lives with her family and other furry creatures in rural Wisconsin and across the street from the local Hebrew cemetery. One thing she loves about the neighbors: They're very quiet and come around for sugar only once in a blue moon.

Editorial Reviews

"Bick has a winner with this series and your students, including reluctant readers, will love it." —starred review, Library Media Connection

From the Publisher

Bick delivers an action-packed tale of an apocalypse unfolding, launching a trilogy with flair. While camping in a national park in Michigan, 17-year-old Alex, a girl coping with a brain tumor and the side effects of its treatment, survives a series of electromagnetic pulses that may have taken out the entire world. Miles from nowhere, she hikes with new companions—an obstinate eight-year-old orphan named Ellie and a young soldier named Tom—as they try to make sense of things. Aside from wrecking their equipment, the pulse has killed most adults and morphed young people into psychotic flesh-eating monsters that are soon dubbed the Changed. Alex is different, too (her formerly dead sense of smell is now nearly supernaturally strong), and the companions worry about their own potential to "Change" as they attempt to find other survivors. Bick (Draw the Dark) doesn't shy away from gore—one woman's guts "boiled out in a dusky, desiccated tangle, like limp spaghetti"—but it doesn't derail the story's progress. If readers have any complaint, it will be with the ending, which only sets up the next book. Ages 14–up. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

For fans of postapocalyptic and horror fiction, Bick has created a story of equal parts intrigue and gore. The first of a trilogy, ASHES begins with a sudden electromagnetic pulse that wipes out the power grid and kills people by the thousands. Katherine Kellgren narrates the tension-filled action at a lightning pace and creates a range of vocalizations that at times border on the grating. Protagonist Alex finds herself with an 8-year-old girl to watch over, a newly acquired super-sense of smell, and an uncertain path through the destruction, which involves the discovery of others who have been “spared” and a fight to the death against flesh-eating zombies. The author’s frenetic characterization of Alex is tempered by Kellgren’s ability to draw the listener into each scene. E.A.B. 2012 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2012 - AudioFile

When civilization ends and you're faced with an army of face-eating, nuclear-mutant zombies, having a brain tumor doesn't seem so bad.

Alex, orphaned, 17 and dying, decides she's sick of pointless chemo. She bugs out of school for a backpacking trip in the wilderness, determined to make her own end. Just a few days into her trip something terrible happens: A horrible, screeching pain knocks her senseless, kills an elderly backpacker and sends scores of dead birds falling from the sky. Wild dogs in the area seem to have run mad, and did Alex actually see two teenagerseatingan old woman? Along with two fellow survivors—bratty middle schooler Ellie and Tom, a young soldier on leave—Alex seeks safety. Alex and Tom are both outdoorsy, but for every cache of weapons and MREs they find, another horrible event takes place. Their gun-toting survivalism only keeps them safe for so long in a post-apocalyptic America in which most of the other young people have been Changed to cannibals. The requisite creepy cultist village raises excellent questions of trust and society. Alex can't survive on her Glock alone; she needs supplies, knowledge, allies and affection.

Splendidly paced apocalyptic zombie horror ends with a thrilling, terrifying cliffhanger and a number of unresolved mysteries.(Horror. 12-15)

Kirkus Reviews