March 2015 Book of the Month Andrew Smith’s novel Grasshopper Jungle, a wild and totally original adventure about giant killer bugs terrorizing a small US town, is on the longlist for the Carnegie Medal. Here again he puts adolescent boys at the heart of a sophisticated and skilfully structured sci-fi story.
Fifteen-year-old Ariel first escapes death in his country’s civil war by hiding in a refrigerator, later to be saved from the hell of a refugee camp and offered a new life with a family in the US. There he spends a summer with his adopted brother Max at the strangely sinister Camp Merrie-Seymour for boys. A separate strand of the story involves the survivors of an expedition to the Arctic in the 1800s, another describes the nightmare road trip of ‘the melting man’ – a deranged individual who is quite literally falling to pieces. The three stories are linked, everything leads back to the bizarre activities of the research laboratories where Max’s dad works. Extinction, identity, freedom of choice, language, war and brotherhood, they’re all themes in this extraordinary novel. ~ Andrea Reece
Click here to read a blog written by Andrew Smith about the story behind The Alex Crow.
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Ariel, the sole survivor of an attack on his village in the Middle East is ‘rescued’ from the horrific madness of war in his homeland by an American soldier and sent to live with a family in suburban Virginia. And yet, to Ariel, this new life with a genetic scientist father and resentful brother, Max, is as confusing and bizarre as the life he just left.
Things get even weirder when Ariel and Max are sent to an all-boys summer camp in the forest for tech detox. Intense, funny and fierce friendships are formed. And all the time the scientific tinkerings of the boys’ father into genetics and our very existence are creeping up on them in their wooden cabin, second by painful second . . .
The LoveReading4Kids Editorial Team have read and reviewed The Alex Crow and determined it is suitable for children aged 15-18 years old
The Alex Crow features in the following genres: Books of the Month, Recommendations, Science Fiction, Children's and Young Adult Fiction, Children’s, Teenage and Educational, Thrillers, Adventure Stories, Recommended Children's eBooks, Featured Books for Young Adults
The Alex Crow is available in Paperback
The Alex Crow was written by Andrew Smith and published by Egmont Books Ltd an imprint of Egmont UK Ltd
The Alex Crow has 277 pages
