Suzanne Weyn

When, just ten years in the future, oil supplies run out and global warming leads to devastating storms, senior high school classmates Tom, Niki, Gwen, Hector, and Brock realize that the world as they know it is ending and lead the way to a more environmentally-friendly society.

Empty

Briar Rose

*Review also posted at Briar Rose Reads

I must confess: I am a bit obsessed with dystopian and post-apocalyptic YA fiction. For me, as with most people, it probably started with The Hunger Games, and grew from there. Soon after reading The Hunger Games, I found Carrie Ryan’s haunting, claustrophobic The Forest of Hands and Teeth, and I was hooked. Though those two series are very different, they share a kind of raw desperation that I found beautiful, and I’ve been searching for more of it ever since.

I started “Empty” with high hopes. The cover is well-done, and the premise sounded timely in a compelling way. I think we’re all aware that our connected modern lives are powered by a non-renewable resource, and I was excited to find a YA book addressing what might happen once that resource starts running out.

Unfortunately, I was disappointed. I tried to like the book, but its flaws were numerous and glaring enough to keep me from getting absorbed in the story. The writing seems stilted and amateurish, and the characters frequently spout awkward, paragraph-long info-dumps. So many anvils are dropped that I’m surprised I finished the book without a concussion. I love books in which the message is a organic part of the story; in “Empty” the message has been shoe-horned in as frequently and loudly as possible.

Then there were the characters, all too often flat and cliché. The worst offender was the stereotypical cheerleader, whose “character growth” moment was deciding it was okay to wear glasses instead of contacts. (Not even because she had come to understand that appearance didn’t matter much in a world gripped by crisis—more because she realized she still looked pretty in glasses.) A few of the second-tier characters had the potential to be interesting, but they got sadly little attention.

To my total lack of surprise, the ending was incongruous, bordering on deus ex machina. (view spoiler)[The main female character finds a random abandoned house in the woods, complete with garden and self-sustaining energy source. Hallelujah, we’re saved! (hide spoiler)]

I still think the premise of the book is good, but the execution leaves much to be desired. My advice: read Paolo Bacigalupi’s excellent Ship Breaker instead.

Kirsten Simkiss

This one was a quick read. Granted, its intended audience is much younger than I am, but it was still pretty basic in terms of the plot and the message. The science was wobbly at best and the characters were all lovesick teenagers that manage to stumble into a way to magically fix the gasoline obsessed world. All in all, I'm going to give it 2.5 stars, but for Goodreads, I'll round it up to a 3 star rating. 

The message is a good one, and something people should be more aware about than they are, but the science behind the story is thin at the best of times. As a resident of North Carolina, which often gets bashed by hurricane weather, I had a laugh when the author described a hurricane as a category six. A simple check on Wikipedia would have fixed that.

I also felt that the characters were pretty much all the same character, despite stressing that they had one high school thing that made them stick out. They were all obsessed with romance even as their mothers died of pneumonia in shelters or as they starved. It was a little irritating. In situations like this, I much prefer platonic relationships to lovesick puppies.

This is easy to read and explains the concepts that might be harder to those with no knowledge, so I guess this is a good book for people of any age. However, I did find the writing quite juvenile.

Maria Banning

Short but well written. Wish it was longer.

shalee olsen

Empty is described as a dystopian but I would not say that.. Suzanne wants to bring to our attention (by blowing it up with flashing neon lights and sirens) the possibility of our world running out of fossil fuels and what it could do to our world. 

While I did find the way that the characters discussed the situation annoying, I still enjoyed the book. I thought the characters were nice and real, as well as most of the situations we find them in. I think that the way that city resolves the situation after the hurricane was under developed and in my opinion, unrealistic. I know that its obviously a book, but it goes from, the most absolute worst (the world is going to end) to everything is great and happy, overnight. I just needed a little bit more story to believe that this could actually happen.

That being said I was very intrigued to see how it was all going to pan out for these teens and their town. I loved that the focus of the story wasn't on a romance. Of coarse it cant be completely void of it and we do have a love triangle. But it is not the focus of the book. Just right for me.

I think that Suzanne would have done a better job at just telling the story, instead of trying to convince all of us readers to convert to electric cars, and the importance of wind power. Or maybe just have done it in a slightly less noticeable way.

Empty

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