"shade's children"

i finished reading garth nix's "shade's children" this weekend.

!!!spoiler alert!!! the story takes place in a post-apocalyptic world in the non-too-distant future, surprise, surprise. one fateful day, "the change", all humans over fourteen years of age disapear. those remaining are herded into concentration camps or otherwise killed. why? because beings calling themselves "overlords" have decided to make earth a battle ground for creatures who are built from body parts harvested from fourteen-year-olds. a resistance movement orchestrated by shade, an artifical intelligence program, created by a computer scientist prior to the change, seeks to discover the source of the overlords power and destroy it. the book follows one of shade's cells, comprised of ella, drum, ninde, and gold-eye.

i liked it! the action was fast-paced, but i didn't feel like i was reading a movie script. the character development was good, the world imagined by nix interesting, and the mood ominous. i flipped through the pages so quickly, i didn't have time to note down interesting quotes, save two near the end:

(1) "There comes a tide in the affairs of men, that if taken at the flood...or something like that. There is still a chance, a very slight chance."
(2) "Then they were dead, and the sun moved around, bringing the shade to wrap around their bodies like a shroud."

rating: 7/10