Blood Red Road by Moira Young

Synopsis from Goodreads: Saba has spent her whole life in Silverlake, a dried-up wasteland ravaged by constant sandstorms. The Wrecker civilization has long been destroyed, leaving only landfills for Saba and her family to scavenge from. That's fine by her, as long as her beloved twin brother Lugh is around. But when a monster sandstorm arrives, along with four cloaked horsemen, Saba's world is shattered. Lugh is captured, and Saba embarks on an epic quest to get him back. 


Suddenly thrown into the lawless, ugly reality of the world outside of desolate Silverlake, Saba is lost without Lugh to guide her. So perhaps the most surprising thing of all is what Saba learns about herself: she's a fierce fighter, an unbeatable survivor, and a cunning opponent. And she has the power to take down a corrupt society from the inside. Teamed up with a handsome daredevil named Jack and a gang of girl revolutionaries called the Free Hawks, Saba stages a showdown that will change the course of her own civilization.

Blood Red Road has a searing pace, a poetically minimal writing style, violent action, and an epic love story. Moira Young is one of the most promising and startling new voices in teen fiction.

If you're looking for a fast paced, fun novel, Moira Young's Blood Red Road is the book for you. This book had everything you could class as seriously bad ass. It had cage fighting, huge killer worms, a kick ass heroine, and lots and lots of fight scenes. Awesome.

Prior to reading this book, I read a lot of reviews of this book, just to see if it was worth me buying or not, and one complaint that kept coming up was: The writing. It's not that the writing is bad in any way, but it's different. It's written how the people in the book, for example 'yer' is your and 'gawd' is god, etc. It also doesn't have speech marks because the people aren't exactly educated. For some people, it might take sometime getting used to, and for some people, it may be too annoying to read on. But, for me, it was fine, since I had read the Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness before, so I was used to books being written like that.

 The characters were also great, too. I loved Saba. She's not your typical YA heroine. She's stubborn, brave, loyal, and as Jack describes her: 'hard hearted'. I loved Jack, the love interest, too. He's funny, he's sometimes sweet and he says some pretty perfect stuff. One of my favourite lines of his is: “Yer in my blood, Saba, he says. Yer in my head. Yer in my breath, yer in my bones...gawd help me, yer everywhere. You have bin since the first moment I set eyes on you." My reaction to reading that was probably something like: AW ASKJFDSKJDSLKJDDS. The other characters were also excellent, I especially liked Saba's little sister, Emmi, and I absolutely adored how her and Saba's relationship developed throughout the book! I also really liked Ike.

This book did have its faults, though. I think some parts could've been fleshed out a bit more with more description, like some of the action scenes. I also wished that it could've gone into Saba's and Lugh's back story a bit more.

But besides that, the book was fantastic. It has great characters and character development, it's emotional, it's romantic, it's got lots of drama and suspense and it's set in a frightening, unpredictable world!  I'll DEFINITELY be reading the next one!

Rating: 5/5