It´s been forever since I read Middle Grade books. And I have never reviewed one on this blog. But let me tell you something, when I got pre-approved for SKY JUMPERS by Peggy Eddleman on Netgalley, I jumped up and down. See, Peggy was one of the first bloggers I followed and interacted with.
Her blog´s always delightful and she´s so very nice that I thought the blogging community was going to be a great place to be (and I was right!).
You know when you start reading a book and you´re nervous because you want to love it but you´re not sure if you will. Well, as soon as I finished the first page of SKY JUMPERS, all doubts went out of the window. I fell into the story right at the beginning, the characters grew on me and I wanted to know what would happen to them.
What happens when you can’t do the one thing that matters most?
12-year-old Hope lives in White Rock, a town struggling to recover from the green bombs of World War III. The bombs destroyed almost everything that came before, so the skill that matters most in White Rock—sometimes it feels like the only thing that matters—is the ability to invent so that the world can regain some of what it’s lost.
But Hope is terrible at inventing and would much rather sneak off to cliff dive into the Bomb’s Breath—the deadly band of air that covers the crater the town lives in—than fail at yet another invention.
When bandits discover that White Rock has invented priceless antibiotics, they invade. The town must choose whether to hand over the medicine and die from disease in the coming months or to die fighting the bandits now. Hope and her friends, Aaren and Brock, might be the only ones who can escape through the Bomb’s Breath and make the dangerous trek over the snow-covered mountain to get help. For once, inventing isn’t the answer, but the daring and risk-taking that usually gets Hope into trouble might just save them all
Five reasons to love SKY JUMPERS
- Hope is my kind of characters, she´s trying so hard to be perfect, not realizing that what she sees as weaknesses are seen by others as strengths. Really, there is a moment at the beginning of the book when I wanted to pull Hope into a hug and tell her that she´s special, despite not being good at inventing things.
- The secondary characters are not secondary. The relationships of Hope with all of them makes them special, and makes them leap off the page.
- The Bomb´s breath turns into a character of its own – the descriptions are vivid…
- The adventures. SKY JUMPERS is full of them. Between the bandits arriving in town, the need for medicine, the jumps, protecting their loved ones, Hope and her friends embark on scary adventures. It´s a page turner!
- Like the name of the main character, this story is full of hope. Hope in people, hope in the world…despite the hardships and all that they´re going through.
If you end up picking it up, I would love to hear your thoughts!
Elodie Nowodazkij 