Infestation by Timothy J. Bradley
My rating: 4/5 cats
hurray!! i can finally write a real review for this! but never fear, the parade of creepy ant-pictures will remain for those of you who like to spend your day scrolling through giant streams of creepy ant-pictures.
you know who you are.
okay, so, infestation. this book is put out by scholastic, which makes the general age of its intended readership in the 8-12 range?? is that correct?? and given the subject matter and all-male cast, i would assume its audience is young boys.
so what does it say about me that i liked this one so much more than The Colony: A Novel which was a giant-killer-ant book for grown-ups. it probably says more about the author, actually. let’s not make this all about meeeeee…
so this one takes place in a reform school in the middle of the new mexico desert. a pre-juvie-hall program for bad boys to get them back on the track to becoming fine upstanding citizens
andy is sent here because he has had bad luck with his foster families, and no one seems to know what else to do with him. he meets the evil headmaster, and some assorted pyros and bullies and general teen ne’er do wells, but not only that, the place seems to be experiencing a bit of a bug problem.
which is bad enough, but uh-oh, no one told them the school was built on an abandoned experimental genetics lab filled with mysterious chemicals and mutagens.
which the boys find when they discover a secret passageway leading to a warehouse deep in the bowels of the school.
boys love secret passageways. and also chemicals.
the boys are just feeling each other out, stepping to each other when the need arises, because in pre-juvie, kids gotta be hard and all that. and after an incident, several boys get sent to an overheated outbuilding for punishment, all glaring at each other and keeping their vulnerability hidden away.
but then, suddenly, ESSPLOSION!!!
and the school is more or less destroyed. and overrun with ants. not ant-ants, but lion-sized ants.
seriously.
this is problematic.
everyone else seems to be dead, either essploded or eaten by these giant ants.
but one thing bad boys know how do is survive.
and they can make weapons out of anything…
joining them in their busted-up school is an entomologist who was called to the scene to study the bug problem that had the exterminators scratching their heads.
together, he and the boys must find a way to kill the bugs and escape before they are all nommed up. (i keep calling them bugs—because i am a girl)
this book manages to do what The Colony: A Novel failed to do: weave the antformation into the narrative
in a way that is fun-learning and not info-dump.
for example:
But the size thing is really throwing me. Insects just can’t grow this large. Part of it is the breathing problem, but another challenge would be their skeleton and muscles. Mammals like us have our skeletons inside our bodies. That provides a nice, stable framework for our muscles to attach to, and allows us to move around easily. Insect skeletons are on the outside of their bodies. Their muscles are attached to that exoskeleton. It works really well if you’re small and light, but the largest insect around now, the Goliath beetle, grows about as big as your hand. Any larger, and their muscles can’t provide enough force to move their body. Plus, you need lots of oxygen to fuel those muscles. You’d need efficient respiratory and circulatory systems to take in enough oxygen and pump it around the body to power the muscles.
gerry-the-entomologist serves as an ant expert, but also as a sort of role model to these troubled boys.
He’d never met anyone like Gerry before, so excited about just learning things. His excitement was contagious. It made Andy want to help find out more about the deadly creatures, despite the danger they were in. Andy had never been all that interested in science before, but maybe with a teacher like Gerry, things might have been different.
it’s really a fun book with plenty of awesome action sequences, and room for a sequel in fewer than 200 pages!
i will read that sequel.
oh, how i will read it.
and three words to give you chills: giant flying ants.
yup. awesome.
OLD SCARY ANT REVIEW:
i read this, but i am not allowed to review it until 30 days before its publication! see you in march!
for now, please enjoy this placeholder:
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