Traverse

by Tomer Perry

Eighty years after the earth was consumed by Nuclear Genocide a totalitarian society thrives two hundred feet above the earth's surface in Skydomes. Max, an orphan, discovers his past and the truth about the Great War as he sneakily investigates remnants of underground bunkers that once held the fortunate survivors of the war. Across the oceans and hidden away from the Skydomes reach lives a small native community protected by a humanoid races technology. Kina the survivor of a nearly extinct alien race was sent to earth to grow to her teenage years, train and return to her home world to fight for its survival. Follow these two unlikely heroes as they battle for survival of each of their races existence in the known universe.

170 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 11, 2012

Reviews

[J.B. Richards · Rating 4 out of 5]

Teens and young adults, in particular, will enjoy “Traverse Book 1”, a post-apocalyptic tale primarily about an orphan named Max and a few hundred survivors living the urban life in a huge glass-bubble-city that was constructed by their forebears after a global nuclear genocide. A secondary story also introduces Kina, another 15-year-old apocalyptic survivor, whose New Zealand Maori island culture has somehow escaped total annihilation. Like Max, Kina is also an orphan. However, she is also a descendant of an alien race who is now seeking her true purpose in order to save her people from a dismal future.

Perry’s plotline winds its way through one speculative adventure after another as we mainly follow Max through the restricted, half-buried tunnels under the Skydome in search of his ancestral roots. He somehow manages to survive one hairy encounter after another as he finds clues that may provide answers to humanity’s future. Meanwhile, in the secondary storyline, Kina comes into her own as she is introduced to a stasis pod that explains her otherworldly origins and she embarks on a mission to return to the planet of her origin. But Kina’s ties to earth are strong, and somehow she must find a way to save the people she’s supposed to be leaving behind.

Many formatting issues plague this novel (typographical errors, sentence structure, paragraph separations, etc., but among the most distracting issues is the unidentified and annoying photograph that sporadically appears within the text. The offending image consists of a mostly white background with a series of blurred, horizontal stripes across the bottom. Whether this image represents Earth’s foggy condition after nuclear fallout is anyone’s guess, but its purpose is unclear and has no place being posted over and over again throughout the book.

Also, it’s not at all clear how the two protagonists in this story relate, unless there is a follow-up novel in the works that brings them together. The adventures of each protagonist do hold one’s attention, but the author may have done better to either; keep these two storylines separate and apart until such time as the secondary story is ready to be introduced into the primary tale; or, provide some foreshadowing to give the reader direction as to how the two stories relate.

Although there are the aforementioned issues with this novel, Perry’s writing is imaginative and sound, and his characters are well-developed and engaging. Max and Kina’s nail-biting adventures make it hard to keep one’s attention away from their separate objectives for any length of time, and readers will find themselves scurrying for spare time just to rejoin this compelling action-adventure. Young adults and older teens will enjoy this coming-of-age, dystopian yarn that somehow hits a nerve with an all too familiar political note on our current state of existence… Be warned or suffer the consequences.

[Jenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed his debut book written by my dear friend, Tomer Perry. I always enjoy a good dystopian society, and in this case, 2 of them. I can’t wait to see what is in store for Max and Kina next.