Clayton, Emma. The Roar. Chicken House. April 2009. ISBN: 978-0-439-92593-8. Gr 5-8.
-- School Library Journal, 1/14/2009
I liked the plot a lot. It was interesting, realistic and unique. I liked how they were selecting the best kids and training everyone to fight. The Pod fighter was interesting and so was the futuristic city - that was what caught my attention. The ending was horrible. Mika talks to Gorman, then meets his sister and then everyone escapes. How? And the city in the book did not look like that. And what was with the lion's face? What happens afterward? It ends way too quickly.I was left with a lot of questions. How do the kids get those powers? Why didn't the northern people attack early? If they told everyone the truth they would have a even bigger, fanatical, furious army. Gorman was a horrible villain. Scared of 12 year olds, having nightmares. He should have had all those police men on the boats shot. His men were pathetic too. They hesitated too much and should have shot the kids on sight. Same with the riot. The army should have machine gunned the lot. What was the point of the contest anyway? They could have trapped all the kids without it.
The northern side had space stations and space freighters and could have made colonies. Why didn't they just nuke the rich people on the other side? Did no regular person ever just look over the wall and see the forest and mansions? The wall should have been bigger. Also, for all the people, there weren't enough kids. Only 200,000, that's way too small of an army to take on killer moth borgs and things with lightning guns. The north should have been even more crowded, with platform cities in the seas and covering all the land. Why was a monkey included in the story? That was pointless. – Luke M., age 15
This review is from a member of the Teens Know "Best" YA Galley Group of the St. Paul Public Library and the Metropolitan State University Library and Learning Center (MN), a part of YALSA's Young Adult Galley/Teen Top Ten Project which uses 15 public libraries and school library media centers from across the country to provide feedback to publishers of young adult books.
