Above by Isla Morley
My rating: 3/5 cats
i love the idea of this book, but for me, the execution fell a bit flat.
this book combines two incredibly marketable themes: abduction and the apocalypse.
16-year-old blythe is kidnapped by dobbs, a man who works in her school library and decides she is “special,” so he squirrels her away in an old abandoned missile silo that he has outfitted into a survivalist stronghold to wait out the end of the world, which he claims is imminent. 17 years later, she manages to escape with her son. and what do they see? was dobbs onto something or just a deluded old perv??
that is just a fantastic premise, there.
one of my problems was with character. blythe just didn’t ring true for me as a modern-day sixteen-year-old girl from kansas. there is something very old-fashioned about her, in the pre-abduction parts, and at first, i actually thought this was historical fiction, but partway through, they refer to a town anniversary, and i did the math, and that turns out not to be the case.
then i thought it was because the author is from south africa and maybe she was just missing the feel of an american teen, even though she now lives in california.
but as i read further, i started getting a christian-fiction kind of feeling from it, with its biblical allusions and quotations, and just a general tone – nothing specifically preachy or proselytizing, but there is this kind of referential veil sorta enshrouding the text – you can sense it, but it is difficult to pin down. and it turns out morley’s husband is a minister, so while this book is not on a christian imprint, it makes sense that faith permeates the text, and it feels different than other similarly-themed books i have read.
and that’s not a slam – i have no problem with religion finding its way into a text, and this isn’t a gentle jan karon type of book: blythe does have a child with her abductor so even though it doesn’t get rapey and gratuitous from the outset, the inevitable does occur and it is obviously horrifying. but it must be noted and addressed that this book does have a subtle-but-obvious-once-you-clock-it, christian fiction feel to it, and it might account for my hang-ups about blythe’s feeling “off.”
moving on.
the silo years are handled well. if you have read Room, you kind of know what to expect, although there is more character given to dobbs than the abductor in Room, from what i remember. dobbs has constructed quite a little haven for himself and becomes a modern-day noah, having archived, in formaldehyde, two of every many animals, and drawers full of seed packets in order to rebuild nature once it is safe to go out. and he has his special blythe with whom he will repopulate the world. he comes and goes as he pleases, bringing back food for them both, and later, for adam, their son. and although blythe tries many times to escape, she eventually resigns herself to her situation and tries to at least make life tolerable for adam. like Room, there is a lot of focus on motherhood and sacrifice and inventiveness, as she tries to build a world for adam within the confines of the silo.
but eventually, she does manage to escape with adam
and the rest of the review is secret. i know how tempting it is to click the spoiler tags, and i have done it myself many times, usually regretting it afterwards. but it is your life to live, and no one is keeping you in a silo (i hope), so you are free to do as you please.
View Spoiler »so after all THAT.
there are peaks and valleys. it’s worth checking out, but it was a like-but-not-love read for me.
