Chuck Wendig

The Harvest by Chuck Wendig

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The Harvest* is Chuck Wendig’s third instalment in his Heartland series. If you haven’t read the first book, Under an Empyrean Sky or the second Blightborn, you might want to check out the links to my reviews of those, as there are spoilers to the first two books below.

25122002Cael’s crew has come a long way since we first met them on board the Betty, racing Boyland’s crew to a scavenging site. At the end of Blightborn they’ve been scattered and we left Cael falling to earth from the flotilla Saranyu, sabotaged by the Sleeping Dogs. The beginning of Harvest shows us how his Blight rescues him, cushioning his fall and enabling Esther (aka the Maize Witch) to wrap him into a living cocoon to enable him to heal. Wanda decides she wants to become one of the Blightborn to be like Cael, so Esther infects her with the Blight, thus initiating the transformation of her character for the rest of the book.

We also find that Lane is in charge of the settlement that has sprung up in the ruins of the fallen flotilla, while Rigo is scratching out a meager existence as a beggar in a town on the border of the Heartland. Gwen and Boyland, with the others who escaped the flotilla with them, are hiding on a small farm, living on what they can grow from Balastair’s seeds. It’s a quiet existence that’s destined not to last.

The Empyrean is making its own plans. A new weaponized flotilla is under construction in secret, and a young Empyrean woman has spent the time since the fall of the Saranyu flotilla training a corps of killers. It’s her goal to take back the remains of the Saranyu and avenge all who fell with it – and that means eliminating Cael, Gwen, and all their friends.

17817631The Heartland series is an action packed ride, and The Harvest doesn’t disappoint. The trilogy starts with a focus on Cael, his three friends and his nemesis, Boyland, in the first book, in the small town of Boxelder, and gradually expands to encompass more people, the wider Heartland and the Empyrean flotillas and society. In dystopic tradition, it’s a story of the oppressed rising up against a privileged elite, and it’s heroes are engaging, likable and flawed.

As a conclusion to the series, The Harvest plays out the implications of the Empyrean focus on genetically modified aggressive corn and of the Blight,  and their creator’s role in the Empyrean-Heartland system. Each character is well developed across the trilogy, even some of the minor ones, each experience and choice having its impact, so it’s interesting to look back from the end of The Harvest to see how far Wendig has brought them.

20483018There weren’t many negatives for me, but one is that I’d hoped to discover by the end of the series exactly why the Empyrean elite chose to live in floating cities, given the logistical problems and huge energy consumption that would entail, not to mention the very real threat of disaster. Unfortunately no explanation was ever given. The only other thing was that I felt the climax and resolution in The Harvest is rushed. There’s a final confrontation, then the moment arrives which will change the lives of every Empyrean citizen and Heartlander forever – and it cuts to an epilogue. As epilogues go its a nice touch, but I was a bit peeved not to see the effects happen, or at least start to happen, and only get a scene many years down the track.

Overall it has lots of elements to enjoy, including aggressive crops, cyborg technology, hoverboats on land and human/plant genetic melding to name a few. It also has doses of what it means to be a friend or be in love and how our choices and experiences impact on our relationships.  The age-old story of exploitation of the oppressed by the powerful remains relevant more than ever with western society’s growing gap between the rich and poor and the continuing poverty in so much of the rest of the world.

The Heartland Trilogy is a good sci-fi action read and The Harvest generally finishes it off well – though if there’s ever a movie, I hope there’s a more satisfying final scene.

*I received an e-copy of this book for review through Netgalley

Netgalley badgeDetails
The Harvest: The Heartland Trilogy 3  by Chuck Wendig
Skyscape
ISBN: 978-1477830024
Published:  14 July, 2015

Links:
Under an Empyrean Sky : Heartland 1
Blightborn: Heartland 2
Links: terribleminds - Chuck Wendig’s website

 

 

Blightborn: Heartland 2

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The second of Chuck Wendig’s dystopian YA keeps the action going, and reveals that a floating city isn’t always the paradise the Heartlanders were led to believe.

20483018Gwennie and her family have been whisked away to a flotilla after winning the Heartland Lottery. Instead of being rich and feted, though, they’ve been separated and forced to worked at difficult, menial jobs. Mucking out stables is better than other alternatives Gwennie had been slated for, but still she doesn’t even know where the rest of her family is. When she has to dress up to attend a party and spies Cael’s sister, why doesn’t Merelda even acknowledge her? It seems the flotilla is a dangerous place to be.

Cael, Lane and Rigo, declared outlaws, have taken off via a raft on rail lines to find the flotilla and bring Gwennie back. There are more dangers in the cornfields than they anticipated, though, and it’s hard to tell friend from foe. When Cael finds himself changing, who can he count on? Will his old friends stick by him?

Back in Boxelder the Empyrean Proctor is stuck trying to clean up the mess they left behind. She enlists Boyland, Wanda, and Rigo’s father into a posse to track down Cael and his friends. What happens when – if – they find their quarry? Whose interests will prevail?

Wendig keeps the pressure bubbling in Blightborn,* the second installment of the Heartland trilogy. It’s not unexpected that the flotillas are subject to political and social pressures, with their own hierarchies, social classes and slums, but it’s handled well. The mechanics of the flotilla and their level of science and technology are not explained in detail, but plenty is given to be believable and for the story to work.

The complications that arise for Cael, Lane and Rigo are new, though the groundwork for them was built into the first of the trilogy, Under the Empyrean Sky. It’s satisfying to see the threads from the first book being woven into this one.

I only have a couple of minor disappointments. The main one is that we still don’t know why the Empyreans took to the sky in the first place. It seems a huge and difficult undertaking not to be explained. We also don’t know why they don’t allow the Heartlanders to grow their own food. In the first book there was a specific mention of destroying fruit trees which remained blackened, so obviously the land wasn’t used for growing corn. I would think it would make sense to keep your manual labour force healthy with cheap food; maybe the ration stuff is cheaper, but it’s not explained.

I was a little disappointed that Cael’s father doesn’t make an appearance in Blightborn, though I can see that to include him in an already complicated narrative would have been difficult and probably lengthened it excessively. Hopefully his story arc will be completed in The Harvest: Heartland 3.

The last thing is that I kept thinking that surely somebody on these flotillas would have a social conscience, that some of the privileged would think it wrong to treat the Heartlanders so harshly. There is one character who has sympathy for Gwennie, but I would have liked a streak running through the flotilla. Just my thoughts.

Blightborn is a good second installment. It keeps the action going as its characters grow and change because of their choices and experiences. The momentum of the trilogy is on track, but at the same time Blightborn completes its own story arc with a decent resolution. There are some questions left that need answering, so I’m looking forward to reading the final book, The Harvest.

*I received an e-copy of this book for review through Netgalley Netgalley badge

Details

Blightborn: The Heartland Trilogy Book 2
by Chuck Wendig
Skyscape
ISBN: 9781477817209
Publication: 14 July 2015

Links: terribleminds - Chuck Wendig’s website

 

Under the Empyrean Sky: Heartland 1

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Hoverboats on land, aggressive plants and an oppressive regime. Chuck Wendig delivers a rural dystopia with plenty of action in the first of his Heartland trilogy.

Cael and his hoverboat crew of three scavenge on plains of genetically modified corn, an inedible strain so aggressive it wraps around anything standing still. He’s determined to help his family, to get ahead, but everyone in the Heartland has to scrounge just to manage a tolerable existence. Ruled by the elite Empyrean living in luxury in floating cities, the odds are always stacked against them; they’re even forbidden to grow their own food.

17817631Some people in the Heartlands do better than others, though. The mayor’s Empyrean connections ensure his family gets more than their share of everything, and his son’s scavenger crew cheat their way to the best loot – even if that means wrecking Cael’s boat.

Cael and his crew – Lane, Rigo and Gwennie – have stuck together all their lives. But he’s trying not think about the upcoming Harvest Home Festival, when all seventeen year-olds will be matched with their government-appointed betrothed, to be married in one year. Cael and Gwennie are in love; what will they do if they’re not matched?

He and his friends have to find a way to get past the restrictions places on them. How can Cael keep living in a world that could take everything he cares about away from him?

Under the Empyrean Sky* is the first book in Chuck Wendig’s young adult Heartland trilogy. It’s a fast-paced story of a group of teenagers caught in a system stacked against them.

It’s primarily Cael’s story. He drives the action and we’re shown his motivations, so we understand why he’s impulsive and willing to risk so much. Though the characters of his friends, Lane and Rigo, are not as well developed, both have backgrounds and traits that more than justify their willingness to follow Cael into danger.

A few things remain unexplained about Empyrean rule, such as why they don’t allow Heartlanders to grow fruit and vegetables, or why they live in floating cities. As this is only the first book in a trilogy, perhaps more will be revealed in later books.

At times this novel evokes frustration, not with the story but in the story, as time and again Cael, his friends and his family suffer the injustices of Empyrean rule, either through his home town’s authorities or directly. Wendig throws one thing after another at them, and on occasion one could be forgiven for mistaking it for Lemony Snicket’s ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’.

Perhaps what I found most difficult about the injustices in this story, though, is that although the setting is a fictional dystopia, the control and conditions the people live in are all too common in the real world. There are many places where people have no choice in where they live, the work they do, what they eat, or who they marry. They have arbitrary laws imposed on them and are arrested for disagreeing with the state. Though no one could really understand what that’s like unless they’d been through it, Wendig’s Heartland evokes a sense of the hopelessness and desperation that living in such a society could induce.

Cael and his friends, though, have hope. There are surprises. There are victories. Ultimately they won’t sit back and take the life the Empyrean overlords hand out. And they might even get away with it.

Under the Empyrean Sky is a great read. This book finishes with a satisfying resolution, though there is clearly much more of the story to tell in Books 2 and 3. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

*I received an e-copy of this book for review through Netgalley Netgalley badge

Under the Empyrean Sky: The Heartland Trilogy Book 1
by Chuck Wendig
Skyscape: 2013. ISBN: 9781477817209

Links: terribleminds - Chuck Wendig’s website