Naomi doesn't expect anything unusual from her annual family trip to visit her grandparents in Ireland. What she expects is to celebrate her thirteenth birthday, hang out with her friends Ciara and Shehan, and deal with her gran's Alzheimer's. What she finds is a country hit by an unexpected virus that rapidly infects the majority of the Irish population over the age of twenty-one.

 

Amnestic-Delirium Syndrome (ADS) starts off with memory loss, but the virus soon turns its victims aggravated, blank, or violent. Naomi and her friends must survive on their own, without lucid adults, cut off from the rest of the world, until a cure is found.

 

But there are whispers that ADS is not terrestrial, and soon Naomi and her friends learn the frightening truth: we are not alone.

C.K. KELLY MARTIN's bestselling debut novel, I Know It's Over, was published in 2008. It was followed by One Lonely Degree, The Lighter Side of Life and Death, My Beating Teenage Heart and the sci-fi thriller, Yesterday. A graduate of the Film Studies program at York University, Martin currently resides in Oakville, Ontario.

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Stricken takes readers into a world without adults without showcasing the worst in people ... It is refreshing to have a book take this approach – people don’t have to be terrible for literature to be interesting, but it is often what happens in plots such as this. By keeping the characters calm and the antagonist something other than human, the appeal of this book is broader than teens looking for a dark adventure. Stricken should appeal across gender and genres.

CM Magazine

Stricken

by SJGirl

Naomi and her parents spend every summer in Ireland visiting her grandparents though she knows this summer will be different since her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Naomi’s braced for changes and forgetfulness in her grandmother, what she and no one else expected is that something that mimics the symptoms of Alzheimer’s is infecting other adults, leading to chaos, danger, and kids fending for themselves.

Naomi feels as if she’s fallen behind her Irish friends maturity-wise, so the story gives her a solid arc, you see growth in her as she’s challenged to care for her mother and make life or death decisions with/and for her friends. I also enjoyed that throughout she makes lists, sometimes random just to keep herself occupied or in case she too forgets and at other times poignant, it was a clever way to get to know the character better, and to break up the narrative a bit.

The reason I occasionally liked a break in the narrative is because occasionally it felt like it lacked forward momentum with lengthy passages of listening to news updates or collecting supplies from one place and bringing them to another, some of that seemed as though maybe it could have been condensed in favor of scenes with more pace, a bit more dialogue maybe.

I would have loved more conversations between Naomi and her friend, Ciara, for once, a conversation about their potential mutual love interest, not only would it have made me feel more assured that no one broke any sort of friend code, but to me, middle-grade is the perfect place to prioritize female friendship, particularly to prioritize it over romance.

Not that I disliked the possible romance, it just kind of felt unnecessary, I would have been good with a solid friendship between a girl and a boy that hinted that something might develop in the future when everything calms down. Also, it should be noted for those who don’t care for romance, there isn’t a lot of it, it doesn’t monopolize the story.

To me, the most intriguing relationship in the book belonged to Ciara and her half-brother, it’s an unusual dynamic, and I wouldn’t have minded if Ciara had her own POV in the story to spend a little more time exploring that situation.

While the pace certainly picks up in the final third, the biggest problem for most readers will likely be the ending or lack there of, while an interesting plan of action is set in motion, there aren’t really any answers.


I received this book through a giveaway.