GONE pimping /o/
GONE: Every person over the age of fourteen disappears in Perdido Beach, California. It's the middle of the morning on a regular weekday and suddenly every adult is just... gone. Cars crash into buildings and each other. A fire starts. The kids who are left are unsure of what to do or where to go. Some of them go home to check for their parents; others try to gather up younger siblings or run wild with their friends. It's sort of a joke at first to a lot of the kids in town.
By that evening, no one's laughing. The majority of the kids left in town gather in the town square and mill around, aimless, not knowing what to do or where to go. The electricity is on, but the phones, the internet, none of it's working. There's no way to get in contact with anyone outside of town. All they know is that they're alone. And before long, being alone is the least of their problems.
It soon becomes apparent to the kids of Perdido Beach that even stranger, more dangerous things are happening to them. Kids are starting to develop powers. Animals are mutating. Everyone is being manipulated by kids from Coates Academy, the boarding school for rich, troubled children that sits on the edge of town.
And the worst thing is the knowledge that as soon as they turn fifteen, they, too, will disappear.
Anyhoo, GONE is a series of books by Michael Grant, aka the dude who co-wrote Animorphs and Remnants. There will be six books in the series; three are currently out - GONE, HUNGER, and LIES. The fourth book, PLAGUE, is being released in the states on April 5.
The titles pretty much indicate what goes down in these books. While the first one mainly deals with the loss of all of the adults and the power struggles that ensue between the kids from town and the ones from Coates, HUNGER takes place three months later, after the food has run out, and LIES takes place seven months after the first book and deals with a character telling everyone that if they blink out on their fifteenth birthday, they'll be let out of the FAYZ and back into the real world, where their parents are waiting. Throughout the second and third book another big plot point is the growing power struggle between mutants and normal kids.
If you're interested in starting the series, you can read the first hundred or so pages of GONE here for free.
This series has a huuuge ensemble cast, so pimping everyone out would take forever. I'M JUST THROWING SOME QUOTES UP IN THE HOPES THAT MAYBE YOU WILL WANNA READ IT AND APP PEOPLE. \o/
The Human Crew
"There, spread across one wall, in letters two feet tall, was spray-painted graffiti. Bloodred paint on the pale stone. 'Death to freaks.'"
"There are no parents in the FAYZ. No God, either. There's just humans trying to stay alive, and freaks taking everything for themselves."
Coates
"I'm very interested in the question of disappearing. You know why? Because I don't want to die. And I don't want to suddenly find myself back in the world. I like it here in the FAYZ."
"There had always been a rivalry between the kids in town, who thought of themselves as normal, and the Coates kids, who tended to be wealthy and, although the Academy tried to disguise the fact, strange. Coates was the place your rich parents sent you when other schools found you 'difficult.'"
"Several of us developed strange powers, starting a few months ago. We were like a secret club. Frederico, Andrew, Dekka, Brianna, some others. We worked together to develop them. Encouraged each other. See, that's the difference between Coates people and you townies. In a boarding school it's hard to keep secrets."