4 out of 4 stars
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I'm just gonna get right to it - Amazon Harvest by John Wilson Berry does some really cool stuff. It has some really unique, fascinating creatures but it's not sci-fi, it comes across almost post-apocalyptic but it's localized to one area (not in America), and although the initial main characters are an 18 year old boy and his 26 year old sister and it reads like a YA book, there are all kinds of death and danger everywhere. Above all else, this is a tense book, one with mysteries of all sorts and ferocious foes, from beginning to end. Plus, it kicks off with a kid playing a video game, which is all it takes to draw me in immediately!
Sally Morgan is a researcher with the University of North Alabama on an expedition in the Amazon rainforest with over 10 other researchers and her lazy gamer brother, David. It isn't long into the book, shortly after Sally and a friend go off on their own, that a crazy catastrophic event happens, temporarily rewriting the laws of gravity and turning everything on its side, pulling buildings and everything else toward an unknown focal point. It's an event natives ominously refer to as "Onda do Demônio" - the Demon's Wave. Every bird in the area is either dead or gone, creating at least two gigantic "carpets" of colorful corpses and animals are sprinting away from mysterious, gigantic mountains that suddenly appeared. Worst of all, there are all sorts of crazy, homicidal creatures, with folks often saying things like "the demons carry the trees" in their native Portuguese.
The book switches between up to four different points of view, all third person, as the story progresses. David and Sally are the primary two, as well as Major Marcus Antinasao of the Brazilian Military Academy, leader of Patrol Boat Group (PBG) 31, a small group seeking intel on what's causing every type of satellite and transmission to fail. Two others are introduced this way, and the way they come together and interact despite their separate missions is fascinating. The only exception is one who gets only a brief time in the book and is never heard from again. This is book one in a series, so I'm sure he'll weave his way back into the story later, but it felt silly to have so little of his story here.
The book consistently hits the sweet spot of descriptiveness throughout the book - it wasn't boring and really made it easy for me to feel like I was right there in the action all along. It's also rather successful with the main characters, poor David who lives in his video games (like me), out of shape in an apocalypse, Sally who ends up taking on far more than anyone ever should and does so like a warrior and Marcus who has to keep his men rallied and focused when he can barely do those things himself, making life and death decisions that no one has ever faced on a regular basis. The "demons", too - there are several types of them and they're all as unique as they are ferocious. In fact, the only complaint I have about the descriptiveness and imagery comes before reading a single word - the cover itself.
While there were a couple issues, and the book really could have used some editing, I was hooked from the first page and never let go. I'm psyched to read more of the story in the future books in the series, and can't imagine them being less interesting since both the foreign settings and the characters themselves have so much going on. While it's hard for me not to deduct a star for the dozens of editing fails in the book, the story was just too good and it absolutely gets 4 out of 4 stars. The only people who might not like it are those who want a lot of action or those who are squeamish about death. There is a fair amount of death in the book, which really ensures the reader never feels safe, but it's typically done behind the scenes. This makes for some crazy tension and makes the payoff in the end even better, but it does mean there's not a lot of action going on throughout.
******
Amazon Harvest
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