Review

"This worthy sequel to Hall's The Line (2010) continues to build a dystopian world rich with suspense and moral choices . . . Her dystopian world comes across vividly, and her characters stand out as varied and real." (Kirkus)

"Hall's imaginative dystopian world takes the concepts of good vs. evil and modern vs. primitive into fresh territory with plenty of comparisons to today's world . . . at the conclusion of Away, readers will find themselves eagerly hoping for a third installment." (VOYA Voice of Youth Advocates)

From the Inside Flap

When Rachel crosses The Line she leaves behind everything she has ever known and enters a strange new world: Away. Life there is hard, and survival is never guaranteed. Bizarre, wild creatures roam the forests, and people--the same people she's always been told are dangerous and untrustworthy--have gifts she's never thought possible.

Rachel has to rely on Pathik, the boy she risked her own life for, to help her navigate the strange customs. He's exasperating, but she thinks she can trust him, and she hopes he'll lead her to answers about her father. As it turns out, he leads her to more than she bargained for, and Rachel finds herself on an adventure filled with life and death choices, dark conspiracies, and unthinkable sacrifice.

In a place with no technology, no electricity, no medicine, and very little hope, Rachel discovers that only one thing makes life worth living. If only it's not too late.

From School Library Journal

Grade 7–10—For as long as she can remember, Rachel has lived a quiet life on The Property. Following her father's disappearance and assumed death in a war, her mother has been working as a live-in domestic for Ms. Moore, an orchid grower. But now that she's older, Rachel is consumed with questions about the Line, an invisible border that runs near the greenhouse at the back of The Property, separating the Unified States from Away. It is only when she receives a mysterious message from beyond the border that she begins to learn about her country's true history and the parts her parents played during the War. Hall's first novel gets off to a slow start, and the somewhat convoluted plot and two-dimensional protagonists may lose readers at the beginning. The writing relies heavily on overly long descriptive passages rather than allowing character development and dialogue to move the plot forward. For more engaging dystopian novels, suggest Lois Lowry's The Giver (Houghton, 1993) and Michael Grant's Gone (HarperTeen, 2008).—Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage Public Library, AK
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From Booklist

In this futuristic debut, Rachel lives with her widowed mother, who is a housekeeper on the Property, an estate that borders the Line, a protective barrier that runs along the U.S. border. After a hostile force, the Korusal, blasted the area with atomic bombs, the Line has been rigidly maintained to keep out the Others: people who were trapped in the bombs’ fallout. Rachel is intensely curious about what life is like in the Away, beyond the Line, and when she finds a message from an Other pleading for help, she jumps into action. Her efforts trigger a series of events that not only compromise everyone on the Property but also reveal dangerous secrets. Hall nicely embeds the history of this repressive future world in a tense narrative that will leave readers intrigued with the mysterious Away. Rachel is an appealing character, and her young voice and the straightforward language make this a good choice for introducing young readers to the science-fiction genre. The abrupt cliff-hanger ending will create demand for the next book in the series. Grades 5-8. --Lynn Rutan

Product Description

Quiller, the Bureau's top intelligence agent, prowls the streets of Hong Kong, trailing his prey to the opulent Oriental Club and to an oil rig on the South China Seas. Reprint.

From the Publisher

8 1-hour cassettes

All her life, Takala Rainwater hoped to find the mother who'd abandoned her and her sisters. But she'd never expected the woman to be a shadowy double agent in the spy-ridden underworld. Nor did she anticipate falling for the very vampire who wanted her mother destroyed.

Like his name, Striker Dark was ruthless...and the sexiest thing Takala had seen in both worlds. Her white-magic power—and her willpower—was defenseless against him. But Takala didn't know the long-dead passion she roused in him could end her mortal life. For centuries, Striker had denied himself human blood, but now Takala had resurrected that bloodlust...and only hers would satisfy him....

The crowds are gathered in Pekin for the funeral of their premier. Suddenly the coffin explodes. Quiller is back on another mission with all the usual nerve-chilling happenings - an agent lifeless in the coils of a boa constrictor and a beautiful girl ritually killed on the on the steps of a temple.

A beautifully crafted novel about appetite, desire and murder from award-winning writer Marion Halligan. On a promontory in a lake within a city built by the famed architect Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony, rises an elegant glass confection which is home to the best restaurant in the city - The Point. Here, in lamp-lit art deco splendour, comfortable well-heeled patrons like computer engineer Jerome Glancy, come to break bread and feast on the fine food of its chef, Flora, whose 'food is an idea, carefully thought out, before it becomes flesh on a plate'. In a modern city, the pleasures of gastronomy are neither affordable nor of interest to much of the population and the piece of land on which the Point rests approximates as home for a couple of oddly matched vagrants: ex-lawyer Clovis and a young heroin addict, Gwenyth. When a man is brutally murdered, the paths of the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' cross and what looked like difference suddenly seems strangely more familiar. Now in handsomely re-packaged B format, The Point is a novel of intricate complexity and wit about our appetites and desires and the way they irrevocably shape the world.

From Publishers Weekly

First published in the U.K. in 1995, shortly after the pseudonymous Hall's death from cancer, the 19th book about the British secret agent known only as Quiller, set in Boris Yeltsin's Russia, contains the same reliably exciting mixture of the exotic, the erotic and especially the dangerous as its best-selling predecessors. Hall was a smooth and accomplished craftsman who could set up an action scene with a few deft strokes and then pay it off without a wasted word. Authors of some of today's bloated thrillers could learn a lot from this book's opening pages, as an extremely reluctant Quiller finds himself being coerced into taking on a British-born criminal, Basil Seckes (aka Vasyl Sakkas), who has risen to head up the Russian mafia. Slipping into a notorious Siberian labor camp to rescue the one person with the key to a mission code-named Balalaika provides Quiller's ultimate challenge. Wonderful touches abound, from fighting techniques and the internal politics of Quiller's ultrasecret outfit to the way a small mistake (using a literal Russian translation of an American phrase, "Don't miss this great opportunity") puts Quiller in great peril. Eight years doesn't seem like such a long time, but this last Quiller outing sadly reminds us of how far we've come from a golden age of adventure fiction.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The detritus of the cold war in the former Soviet Union comprises self-serving bureaucracies, opportunistic ex-KGBers, and organized criminals who make their U.S. mafioso counterparts seem like mischievous delinquents. Into the mix drops pseudonymous Brit agent Quiller, with the intent of taking out a British national--Basil Seckes, aka Vasyl Sakkas--who is secretly heading up the burgeoning Russian criminal empire. To bring down Sakkas' empire, Quiller needs the help of one Marius Antonov, currently residing in a Gulag prison. Freeing Antonov entails Quiller making his way into the prison and then escaping with his target, no small feat because the prison is virtually escape proof. Author Hall, whose real name was Elleston Trevor, died in 1995. This is the first U.S. publication of the last Quiller novel, which appeared elsewhere in 1996. The book is a typically atmospheric, exciting Quiller adventure. The author's son and daughter provide moving codas describing their father's courageous battle with cancer and his determination to finish one last novel for his many fans. Wes Lukowsky
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