Ashes, Ashes

Treggiari, Jo. (2011). Ashes, ashes. New York: Scholastic. Sixteen-year-old Lucy is in survival mode on her own in Central Park. It's the end of the world as Lucy knew it, the consequence of floods five years earlier that resulted from changing climate and weather patterns. The floods changed coastlines and submerged many major cities. Then, smallpox and the plague kill off almost the entire population. Lucy's entire family dies, but Lucy is one of the few survivors. Afraid of staying in her New Jersey home alone and wary of the Sweepers and other government agents who seem intent on rounding up the survivors, Lucy has been spending each day looking for food and maintaining her camp. She happens to meet Aidan, another survivor who lives in a commune outside the city, as she is running from a pack of dogs who seem to be tracking her. Their paths don't cross again until a tsunami covers her camp, and she gets out of the area just in the nick of time. Once she arrives at Aidan's camp, she becomes a part of the agrarian society that has been carefully nurtured by an elderly woman, the camp's leader. Each person is expected to work in order to eat, and they plant and harvest tomatoes, beans, and other vegetables, and bake bread. But Lucy is not able to rest for long since the Searchers come to the camp again and again. When she decides to rescue some of the commune's children, she is betrayed, and discovers exactly what it is that makes her so special and the object of all this tracking by men and beasts.

I liked a lot of this dystopian story, particularly the beginning, when Lucy is working so hard just to make it through a day and has forgotten the delights--and difficulties--of social intercourse. I also enjoyed her time in Aidan's camp, but things went downhill fast when she embarks on her journey to the hospital and meets the doctor who is so intent on using her as a lab rat. Dr. Lessing is painted as some kind of mad scientist, and her behavior raises all sorts of ethical issues.

Favorite Lines: 

“And the world mapped in her geography books had changed with a frightening rapidity; continents shifting shape, coastlines altered. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Venice, Thailand, Spain, her beloved Coney Island, Japan, had all but vanished beneath the waves” (p. 2-3).

“The little kids who’d been at the end of her bench were gone. She imagined them bundled in their blankets under tent cover, a tumble of bodies like drowsy puppies” (p. 187).