Review & Contest: BURN DOWN THE SKY by James Jaros

Thanks to a Blogger SNAFU that deleted the posts for Thursday and Friday, I lost all of you who had commented to win a copy of James Jaros' Burn Down the Sky. So if you will, go down and comment again. Just leave your email and I'll draw winners on Monday. Sorry!

Time for another good dystopian novel, James Jaros’ Burn Down the Sky. James Jaros is the pen name of the widely praised thriller author Mark Nykanen, the four-time Emmy winning investigative reporter whose internationally best-selling books have been praised by critics as "irresistible," "vivid and emotional," "nerve-wracking," and "furiously paced." Europe's largest newspaper hailed him as "The new master of the psycho-sexual thriller" for his dark psychological tales. Now, as James Jaros, he sweeps readers into a post-apocalyptic world.

THE OFFICIAL BLURB: After the destruction of nature and the death of the world . . . After the Wicca virus drove billions to madness and suicide, replacing order and reason with violence and terror . . . In the parched ruins of what once was civilization, one commodity is far more valuable than all others combined: female children. When well-armed marauders roll in at dusk to brutally attack a fiercely defended compound of survivors, Jessie is unable to halt the slaughter—and she can do nothing to prevent the ruthless abduction of innocents, including her youngest child. Now, along with her outraged teenage daughter, Bliss, Jessie must set out on a journey across a blasted landscape—joining up with the desperate, the broken, the half-mad, on an impossible mission: to storm the fortress of a dark and twisted religion and bring the children home.

MY THOUGHTS: This isn’t a dystopian novel for wimps, folks. It is intense, brutal, horrifying and utterly compelling. There's no romantic backstory. Even the happiest-imaginable ending isn't hearts and flowers. 

       The point of view goes between Jessie, who’s on the trail to find her young daughter kidnapped by the marauders to sell for sex in a world where sex is deadly except with girls in the first year after they begin menstruating, and her young daughter Ananda, who despite being resilient and savvy, gets caught in horrific circumstances. 

       This is a world where someone can go from enemy to ally―and back to enemy―in a heartbeat, and the weak don’t survive. It’s sure not a world I want to live in, but I did enjoy reading about it in a bleak and frightening sort of way. If you like your dystopias very dark, this is one you want to read. The language is powerful and evocative, and it moves at a rapid clip start to finish. I give Burn Down the Sky a big thumb’s-up.

Want to win a copy of Burn Down the Sky? Do you like to read books that disturb you and make you think, or do you prefer something lighter to help you escape? I like both, depending on my mood. Okay, you know the drill: +1 for comment, +1 for blog follow, +1 for Twitter follow @Suzanne_Johnson, and +1 for Tweet or Retweet. Burn it down!