Slade Carter, The Helios Book, MidnightSun Publishing, May 2024, 211 pp., RRP $17.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781922858412
Twelve-year-old twins, Hugo and Kitty, have adjusted to their special physical difference in that they each have one blue and one hazel eye, a condition called heterochromia, but it is this difference which makes them a target during their holiday in Australia. They make friends with their neighbour Lucas who has invented a solar device which he believes will save the world’s climate and global energy. It’s the Helios Book which others want to use to help themselves. When Lucas goes missing the twins follow a fairy wren down a wombat burrow, into the world of Taara. Many of the inhabitants in Taara are Animorphs, able to move easily between their human and animal shapes, creating some strange creatures. The environment in Taara, dependent on solar energy, is being challenged by the Blurrings and life is not as successful as many people would believe. Hugo and Kitty must negotiate their way, find who is friend and who enemy, in their attempt to return the Helios Book and Lucas as well as themselves, to Earth, before the portal closes.
Slade has created in Taara a world where many extinct animals still exist, including the Tasmanian thylacine, and where animals now cohabit side by side, very different to the world the children have come from. But it’s also a world which is fragile, threatened by uncontrolled forces.
Throughout the story Hugo and Kitty have to work out who to trust, and what decisions will be best for themselves. They manage to do so without life becoming too bleak for themselves or for those reading the story.
I found the first few chapters of the book hard going, and this may be a negative for some readers. For me, the font was too small (reducing the number of pages and therefore the book’s cost?) and Carter’s writing style does not use enough dialogue and relies on descriptive paragraphs, so the pages appear dense. This again might put some young readers off, at least until the action begins and the plot begins to move fast. Once that happens it is a good read.
It’s a book which is sure to generate a lot of discussion about innovations to do with the environment and the best way to save it, climate change and the use of solar energy.
Well done Slade Carter for creating a new world which is grappling with the same problems as Earth is facing and opening the opportunity for discussion amongst young readers.
Reviewed by Maureen Mann
