After a complete breakdown of society in the not-too-distant future, most people survive by their wits, trying hard not to anger the gang leaders who rule small turfs comprised of decaying urban neighborhoods. Like his peers, teenage Spaz does what his gang leader tells him, regularly breaking and entering strangers’ homes to take what few valuables remain. But unlike his peers, Spaz does not use mind-altering recreational drugs because he has epilepsy. So when he meets an old man named Ryter who possesses an odd relic called a book, Spaz is open to new possibilities. And Ryter, it turns out, has the knowledge Spaz needs to cross through forbidden enemy territories to find his sister. For teens not quite ready for A Clockwork Orange , this offers some of the same flavor: a bleak but plausible future that Rodman Philbrick constructs by logically extending the worst of contemporary life; the use of drugs and violence as a means of control; an invented slang that readers must figure out from context; and a young narrator who recounts extraordinary occurrences with dry understatement. His voice provides comic relief in an otherwise heavy story. (Ages 13-16)