A review by booksare42
Terra Electrica by Antonia Maxwell

3.0

Thank you to Neem Tree Press for providing me with a digital copy of this book. Thank you to The Write Reads for organizing this blog tour and providing me with the material for it. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Terra Electrica: The Guardians of the North is a unique middle-grade dystopian adventure. It takes place after climate change has melted all of the ice. There is a mysterious disease that is destroying human kind and an unlikely group of people who might be able to save the world.

I want to start out by saying that I didn’t love this book. While I’m a fan of middle-grade books, I am not a fan of dystopian stories. I think this book did a great job creating a dystopian, post-ice melt world. I appreciated the descriptions of the rising water and the washed out forests; I thought these descriptions did a great job painting a picture of what a post-ice melt world would look like. That being said, the dystopian aspect was not really my thing.

What I did really enjoy about Terra Electrica this book was the adventure aspect. Mani and Leo (who I’ll talk about more in a bit) are travelling to the Ark, which is the main science research centre. They’re also looking for Mani’s father. They have to travel through changing landscapes, struggle to find food, and face various dangers along the way. I loved how resourceful and quick thinking Mani was on this journey. I was definitely rooting for them along the way and I was curious to see what obstacle they’d run into next and how they’d overcome it.

Mani is a fantastic main character. She’s just a child, but she’s been through so much. She knows there’s a mysterious disease that killed everyone in her town, including her mother, and that the only survivors were her and her father. She also knows that her father has been gone for 29 days when he was supposed to be back in 8 days. Desperation brings her to the science lab where she meets Leo and an unlikely friendship is formed. Mani is scared to join Leo on his journey, but she knows she has to be brave to survive. Along the way they meet Tilde, who I’m hoping we get to learn more about later on in the series.

One interesting aspect of this book is the mask that Mani’s mother gave her. When she puts on the mask, she’s transported to another world where the ice and snow still exist and there’s a polar bear named Ooshaka and a crow. I liked how there were scenes where Mani would visit this alternate world and the bits of wisdom that Ooshaka and the crow would try to pass along to Mani. I liked that this added a bit of a folklore aspect to the book and I’m curious about what folklore the author was drawing upon.

One thing that I want to note is that there were a quite a few scenes in Terra Electrica that were fairly dark. While the scenes fit in a dystopian world, I think they push this book to the upper end of the middle-grade scale.

If you’re interested in dystopian world and are a fan of middle-grade books, Terra Electrica is definitely worth checking out