Daniel Cohen starts the school day hoping he’s got the guts to ask his friend Emma to prom. But when his entire town of Amherst, Virginia is destroyed in minutes–leaving only himself, Emma and their friend Crispin as survivors–Daniel must discover a courage that goes far deeper.
HUNTER is the latest release from K.B. Hoyle, award-winning author of the Gateway Chronicles fantasy series (click here for my posts on her updated editions, released in 2018). It’s the prequel to Hoyle’s BREEDER CYCLE, a YA dystopian trilogy set about two centuries later. I devoured BREEDER and CRIMINAL, the first two books of the trilogy, and like many other fans, I’m eagerly awaiting the final installment, CLONE, due out this month (December 2019). The taut prose, complex characters and spot-on ethical issues in this series are dystopian fiction at its cut-to-the-marrow best. So of course, I was curious to get more of the backstory in K.B. Hoyle’s HUNTER.
The Breeder Cycle is set primarily in Colorado, in a post-apocalyptic culture where the Unified World Order reigns supreme (I’ll be covering this trilogy in my next blog post). HUNTER takes place in rural Virginia several generations earlier, and covers the apocalypse itself. But it does so in microcosm, honing in on Daniel’s transformation from boy to man as he deals with the fallout of a world gone mad.
Although HUNTER starts with an alien invasion, it’s not a typical sci-fi read. There are no intergalactic journeys or high-speed air chases. The aliens themselves seem strangely “off,” as does their relationship with the newly-forged Unified World Order (the Breeder trilogy explains why). And although Daniel and Emma make multiple attempts to reach Washington, D.C. and see what shape this strange new world has taken, their plans are thwarted at every turn (I guess we’ll have to wait for CLONE to finally take us to the capital!).
In fact, HUNTER is much more about inner growth than outer journey. Relationship lies at the heart of this story. Daniel is in love with Emma from the outset, but she doesn’t seem to care. Winning her heart is going to take a lot more than flowers: both Emma and Daniel carry childhood wounds that they must confront in order to grow. That’s not easy when their lives are hanging in the balance, with alien creatures hunting them down. Things get even tougher when Crispin is captured, and Daniel discover his own long-lost father in the woods: the one person on earth he hoped to never see again.
Although the Gateway Chronicles are a good fit for both middle grade and YA readers, the Breeder Cycle is best suited to older teen through adult readers, and that goes for HUNTER as well. Emotionally, HUNTER is not an easy book to read. Both Daniel and Emma have experienced abusive pasts that haunt their present. Hoyle treats their wounds with care and wisdom, but readers will still (rightly) feel the horror of what they’ve been through. Prepare to have your heart broken, strengthened and mended right along with Hoyle’s characters as they grapple with a broken world and learn the meaning of both mercy and justice.
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