When the weather is nice, my dog will sometimes plop down in a park on one of our walks and just enjoy laying in the grass for a few minutes. Sometimes I use the time to read emails and other times I pull out my Kindle app on my phone to read for a bit. Rather than using this extra reading time as an excuse to buy or borrow more books, I’ve been going through my existing Kindle library and rediscovering things I have no memory of purchasing.
This book by Peadar Ó Guilín is one I found in my library that I have no memory of purchasing and wasn’t even sure what I was getting myself into when I started reading.
Heads up, it’s super violent and gruesome, and a lot of kids die in this book. Also there’s alcoholism, so if any of those are triggers for you, I suggest you stay very far away from this book.
The book takes place in modern day Ireland, but the island has been cut off from the rest of the world by the Sídhe (fairies). These are not the sweet, pretty fairies I heard about when I was growing up. These are horrifying demons.
The concept of the book is that, centuries (millennia?) ago, humans drove the Sídhe from Earth into the Grey Land and the Sídhe are pissed. The Grey Land is (as the name suggests) always dark and grey and colorless. The ground is barren and covered in either rocks or blade grass, which is knife-sharp blades of grass.
Despite having been banished centuries ago, the Sídhe have recently managed to blur the line between Earth and the Grey Land. It started by cutting Ireland off from the rest of the world so no living human can leave or enter Ireland. This means there are some adults on the island who are not Irish, but got stuck there when Ireland got cut off from the rest of the world.
The title of the book refers to the fact that each child gets a “Call” to the Grey Land once in their teenaged years. They vanish from Earth leaving their clothes behind and they wake up naked and in the dark in the Grey Land, and they have to survive until their time is up. The Call only lasts three minutes and four seconds on Earth, but it’s much longer in the Grey Land. It’s never specified how long it is in the Grey Land (probably because there are no clocks there), but I tend to assume 24 hours.
However long the kids are there they are hunted, not just by the Sídhe, but by the monstrous “animals” the Sídhe have created, and as already mentioned, the land itself is very dangerous.
If the kid survives, they reappear wherever they were when they were Called. If they don’t survive, whatever is left of them reappears. The Sídhe have a sick sense of humor, so sometimes the bodies are mutilated in all kinds of awful ways when they reappear.
When kids first started getting Called, only about one in one hundred kids survived. At the time of the book it’s up to one in ten, which they call progress, but it still means 90% of their kids are getting killed, and the ones that do survive are often maimed and always traumatized.
They’ve set up schools where, instead of learning math and literature, the kids learn as much about the Grey Land as they can and how to improve their odds of surviving. They could get Called at any time so they always have to be prepared. This means things like keeping their hair short so the Sídhe can’t grab it, and foregoing shoes so their feet will be tough enough to run through the Grey Land. They also get combat training and study the Testimonies (accounts from survivors about their time in the Grey Land) to learn as much about the Grey Land as they can.
The main character is a girl named Nessa who had polio has a child, so her legs are slightly better than useless. Nevertheless, she is determined to survive her Call. Every time the students go for a run, she makes herself a pair of crutches using whatever branches she finds. She doesn’t keep a pair of crutches because she knows she won’t be able to take them with her to the Grey Land. If she wants to use crutches there, she’ll have to make them herself, so she keeps up with the practice.
Nessa has a crush on a boy at the school, but she fights her feelings because she’s afraid it’s just a distraction from her training, and she doesn’t want to get too attached to someone who has a 90% chance of dying before his 18th birthday.
Yet Nessa does nothing to fight her feelings for her best friend, Megan, which made me wonder why she seems to think her feelings for some guy are stronger than her feelings for her best friend? This was resolved to my satisfaction before the end of the book, but I’m not going to spoil it for you.
As if things weren’t already bad enough for these poor kids, whole schools start dying without any warning. Apparently they were all poisoned, so now Nessa’s school is on high alert to avoid poisoning while also trying to train their kids to survive a horror movie.
I don’t have any real complaints about this book, it just wasn’t what I was expecting. It’s well written, and I probably would have enjoyed it more if I had known what I was getting myself into. So if you’re looking for a scary read for October, here’s your book.