Hunger (a Gone novel) by Michael Grant

I'm not sure what I was thinking when I picked this up ---- I had already started Kraken, and this book's 590 pages, all by itself!   However, I had put a hold on it at my library, and when it came in, I just had to bring it home......

This is the second book in Michael Grant's "Gone" series.  The basic idea is that one day, without any warning, everyone that's 15 years old and older just disappears from this one area (Perdido Beach).    Once that happens, kids who are 14 years old and younger are left to fend for themselves.   The quote about "Gone" on the back of "Hunger" does a nice job of summing this up:  "If Stephen King had written Lord of the Flies, it might have been a little like this."  VOYA         If you'd like to read a nice summary and review of Gone, here's a link to Teen Book Review.

Getting back to this book, the summary from GoodReads is: "It's been three months since everyone under the age of fourteen became trapped in the bubble known as the FAYZ. Things have only gotten worse. Food is running out, and each day more kids are developing supernatural abilities. Soon tension rises between those with powers and those without, and when an unspeakable tragedy occurs, chaos erupts. It's the normals against the mutants, and the battle promises to turn bloody.

But something more dangerous lurks. A sinister creature known as the Darkness has begun to call to the survivors in the FAYZ. It needs their powers to sustain its own. When the Darkness calls, someone will answer -- with deadly results."

It definitely helps if you've read Gone, because without that, this book doesn't make much sense.  It's been a while since I read that first book, but a lot of it came back to me, and I was able to remember who the characters were once I got going.   This book has the same amount of tension as the first book (maybe a little more), and even though I thought some of the characters were a little too simple to be real, the reader really gets to know them better and really follow how they're handling everything that's happening in the story.    I like how Grant builds this world and makes it scary just because of the normal things, like food running low.  There are a lot of frustrating things that happen just because it's a bunch of kids (although I'm not sure how well some adults would handle this situation).   The idea of the Darkness, or "gaiaphage," is also an interesting concept --- I think that sometimes, the partially unknown can be a whole lot scarier than something completely known.   Kind of reminds me of the best scary movies or books:  there's some hinting, and then your brain is left to fill in all kinds of details.

The third book in this series, Lies, is out now --- definitely planning on grabbing that one from the library, because I can't wait to see what happens!

This book doesn't quite count for my Chunkster Challenge, because the rules say it has to be an adult book.  However, I'm going to count it in anyway --- because I think that at 590 pages, it's definitely a chunk.  And, because I think there are adults that would totally enjoy this series.