How Samantha Smart Became a Revolutionary

Written by Dawn Green

Red Deer Press

978-0-88995-549-3

312 pp.

Ages 13-17

September 2017

The title How Samantha Smart Became a Revolutionary may sound tongue-in-cheek, but there's nothing whimsical about Dawn Green's newest young adult novel.  It's a serious look at how easily a world can go wrong because of the vision of its leaders and how a relative moderate can become a poster child for a resistance movement.

Told in alternating chapters of "Then" and "Now", How Samantha Smart Became a Revolutionary follows the story of teen Sam Smart who begins university, determined not to be distracted from her studies or soccer, and meets a guy named Brady Smith–that's the "Then"– and who is apprehended as a rebel leader of the Wright Resistance–that's the "Now."  "Then" was a time of political fervour as the election for the country's president pitted charismatic John King against more socially responsive Richard Wright.  Though light on platforms, King wins on a smear campaign and begins rampant changes to address significant issues of food, water and energy shortages, pandemics and terrorist attacks.  Sadly he also institutes a new King's Guard ostensibly to serve the community but which, under the leadership of King's key advisor, General Marcus O'Brien, joins with the police and the military and becomes a force to be feared.  Sam may want to keep out of these matters, especially as Brady's family is so pro-King and Brady is determined to appease his father, but Kayla, Sam's roommate and best friend, is an ardent support of Wright and encourages Sam to join her at protests and rallies.  

Sam, I want you to remember this––you can let the moments define you, or you can define the moments. (pg. 115)

The world is changing around Sam and she doesn't like what she sees in King's treatment of immigrants, restrictions, and favouritism for the Guard and allies.  Though it is starting to impact her life–a scholarship lost, Brady joining the Guard, TA friend Aaron heading west to work with Wright's Equality Organization–it's not until she and Kayla, who is being sought out after an incident at a peaceful protest turned ugly because of the Guard, attend a football game where shots are fired and bombs go off that Sam is seen as the face of the Resistance and a rebel by King and his Guard.

See, that's what's wrong with this society.  Giving hero status to a girl they don't even know, based on an inflated image with some catchy hashtag underneath. (pg. 158)

Although Sam has come from a difficult background and is fairly opinionated, courtesy of her grandpa, she does not throw herself into the Resistance like Kayla or speak out against Brady's indoctrination into the King politico machine.  Even a photo taken of her at the O2 attack at the stadium is not indicative of her leanings, only her concern for her friend and compassion for others.  That's when it all changes because it's what others see in her that determines her fate.  And yet, she's still the girl in love with Brady Smith.  How Sam, and ultimately Brady, resolve their relationship with their beliefs and their actions, is not straightforward.

Dawn Green, author of When Kacey Left (Red Deer Press, 2015), packs a lot of story into How Samantha Smart Became a Revolutionary and she tells it with daring. There is a love story, a message about absolute power, about action and inaction in the face of injustice, and how everything can change in a moment and put your life on an unexpected path.  It's also a statement about media and how the powerful may attempt to manipulate it but how others may find ways for the truth to be revealed. In our troubled times, How Samantha Smart Became a Revolutionary is a very telling tale of how things can go horribly wrong with those seeking absolute power.  Though Dawn Green doesn't give us a happy ending, she gives us hope that the story will continue. Sometimes that's even better.

Icarus Down

by James Bow

Scholastic Canada

978-1-4431-3913-7

374 pp.

Ages 12+
September 2016

Icarus Down may be science fiction but it is truly a cautionary tale of environmental destruction, colonization, genocide and cultural discrimination.  Their world, or rather planet, may be foreign to our 2016 one, but it’s what happened on Old Mother Earth that resulted in this new world.

After the Extinction Wars which took place following the Great Warming, the Icarus, a colonizing spacecraft, travelled 25,000 light years into the darkness, spending 72 years looking for a new planet to inhabit.  They called the planet upon which they crashed and settled Icarus Down, a web-like world of thirteen cities tethered by cables to anchors in cliffs far above the fog forest and the ticktock monsters below.

Simon Daub, who begins the telling of Icarus Down, is on his maiden flight as an ornithopter pilot with his older brother Isaac, a senior pilot and all-around golden boy.  Shortly after Isaac reveals to Simon that he believes their mother was murdered, not as a result of jumping to her death, something goes awry with the battery and Isaac, attempting to repair it, is burned to death by the powerful sun.  Simon manages to parachute out but he is badly burned and scarred.  Nathaniel Tal, chief of security for their city of Iapyx and older brother of Mayor Matthew Tal, questions Simon about the “accident” and Grounders, those supporting the move of the colonies into the foggy land below.  His questions make Simon begin to wonder whether Isaac and perhaps his mother had been Grounders themselves.

When lights start flickering, and steam-pipes burst, and message canisters travelling by pneumatic tubes are misdirected, the troubles are attributed to  Grounders terrorism.  Simon, having met with Grounders via Isaac’s betrothed Rachel, suspects the sabotage is being used to discredit their movement and he begins to investigate.  Suspecting Nathaniel Tal of the sabotage, Simon gets in a little too deep and, after witnessing the actions that would result in the inevitable destruction of their city, Simon and Rachel jump into the oblivion beyond Iapyx, hopeful of safety, fearful of death.

Our second narrator in Icarus Down is a human girl known as Small, Fierce-Hearted One to her people, which sounded like Ek-Taak-Tock-Taak in their language.  When she goes in pursuit of revenge on the invaders who destroyed her people and now reside in the air, she is witness to the literal fall of Iapyx, and discovers Simon, injured but alive.

I did not know what I had expected after travelling nine dozen sleeps to one of the invaders’ giant metal hives, but surely not to have it fall and almost crush me.  one of my dreams of revenge were so large. (pg. 163)

Simon, or Silly Strange Boy as she thinks of him, and Ek-Taak-Tock-Taak whom Simon eventually calls Eliza, must find a way to communicate and trust each other in order to survive and attain that which each seeks: justice or revenge.

This is but a slice of James Bow’s complicated story of conflict and colonization and conspiracy.  Though an unfathomable world of tethered cities and planetary travel and lizard-like creatures, the worlds of Icarus Down are reflective of the atrocities perpetrated here on earth in the name of exploration and colonization with the usurping of land and culture for our own purposes.  The truth is out there in Icarus Down but, like with all conspiracies, it is hidden away from those who might demand change.

“If I didn’t do something, this would stay a lie.” (pg. 272)

Icarus Down is about the clash of cultures, invader and indigen, so seemingly different in dress, manner and language at first encounter but who find a way to work together and appreciate their commonalities.  By creating a cosmological allegory of settlement and occupation, with a thrilling adventure of intrigue and treachery, carried out by good guys and bad guys and a few playing both sides, James Bow has made Icarus Down a turbulent bit of travel into an unsettled future, perhaps a little too much like some historical disgraces from which we’ve yet to learn.