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The fact that the Sysco series is talked about in Colorado suggests that this series already has at least some sort of following, but having read volumes 6 through 10 of this 10-book series, I wonder if the majority of those talking about this series have read much of it. I suspect that many people, on hearing that the author is a preteen/teenager, simply think it is amazing that such a young girl could write such a long series of books. McNutt is pointedly not writing in favor of environmentalism, and while she says she wrote her books to address bullying, it is hard to see from her books any clear, coherent anti-bullying sentiment. All her main characters are violent, and really enjoy taunting people for their aesthetic preferences and their weight, so the fact that a few of the characters endured bullying as kids is overshadowed by the rest of the story. Still, for such a young author, the Sysco series is at least a formidable first book, and promises great things should this author write more in the future once her knowledge of the world and her writing skills mature.
In McNutt's books, starting in volume 6, Domtar, Breaking News!, a mutant girl named Sysco and her friends are traveling by car from Nova Scotia to Oregon, to destroy a chemical company. In fact this journey takes 2 books to be completed, as the characters take the long way to Oregon, via Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Utah, a route they repeat off-screen on the way back from Oregon as well. I found this circuitous rout hard to believe, which made the first two books singularly unsatisfying. The main characters also have a pathological hatred of all things 'Western', and enjoy making fun of people who are overweight, thinking nothing of killing them if they are remotely in the way. If confronted with a bit of fiddle or a cowboy hat these characters freak out as if they are being attacked, and they in fact kill an overweight woman they decide is 'creepy' because she likes bluegrass, among other things. In short, it is hard to take the characters seriously, let alone to like them.
They spend 4-5 paragraphs in Oregon, where one of the boys in the group looks at the factory and it explodes, so their mission is accomplished and they turn around and head south again to go through Texas on their way back north to Nova Scotia. Following their adventure traveling to Oregon the main characters, Sysco, Devco, Dolly and Alecto return to Nova Scotia where a massive artificial storm is raging. They are apparently aiming to save the world by stopping the storm, but that target gets lost in the jumble that the rest of the series turns into. There is an evil bad guy, another mutant human named Dosco, who died but returned to the world to kill, destroy, and to harass the main characters, and an ambiguous non-human, or at least odd sort of human, Mearth, clearly a take on 'Mother Earth', but just as sadistic, random, psychotic and destructive as all the rest of the characters in these books.
For the average reader I would not recommend this series. I only finished reading them by imagining all the characters as flat anime caricatures, and for the entire last book I was just waiting for Alecto to finally die already. However, as a novelty this set of books offers an interesting potential for anyone needing to understand the minds of angry, bitter preteens. Teachers and child psychologists for this age group might appreciate reading not just this half of the series, but the whole thing. McNutt demonstrates amply the psychology of her age-group, with a disturbingly casual approach to killing that suggests a mind not yet mature enough to understand death. She is also still too young to understand romance, as well, so her books are very honestly written in that innocent but disturbing mindset that most adults find hard to understand in her age group.
Stylistically the Sysco series reminds me very much of bad anime. The characters yell, shout or scream most of their lines, and they have very spotty attention spans. They can handle killing random people with calm and boredom, but bizarre and seemingly boring conversations are conducted at high volume as the characters all get upset about trivial details, a lot. The main characters all have special powers, and much of the series is spent watching Sysco, Devco and Alecto blow things up or demolish buildings, usually with little or no reason. The series is very repetitious, and could have been a lot shorter (and better) with some serious editing. In fact, I could see McNutt taking the best bits of this series and writing more polished, mature books, once she has matured more as an author, and there are some very creative elements in her Sysco series to work with.
Overall, though, I gave Sysco Volumes 6 to 10 a 1 out of 4 stars rating. There are some particular people, teachers and child psychologists among them, for whom this series could be rewarding, and certainly if this author continues her writing into adulthood she has the potential to write much better books for a wider audience, but the Sysco books in this compilation are not easily recommended otherwise to any reader.
***
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