Patrick Gamble is leaving his life in California and moving to Oregon to live with his mother while his father. who is in the military. is deployed for twelve months. He gets on the plane after saying an awkward good bye to his father, uncertain about what his welcome will be when he arrives in Oregon to meet his mother whom has not seen for quite awhile.
After reaching their cruising altitude, Patrick gets ready to head to the bathroom when a man who is sweating badly and whose face is pale and gray, stumbles down the aisle and into the bathroom. Before Patrick can signal to his seat partner on the aisle that he wants to leave his seat, there is a line of people waiting for their turn in the bathroom. While Patrick debates whether to get in line or wait in his seat a horrific growl comes from the bathroom and the door bursts open revealing a huge thing, furry and ferocious, who attacks and kills the people in line in front of the door one after the other, and then prowls down the aisle ripping the seats and the throats of of any people who get in its way. Patrick knows the thing is a lycan or werewolf although he has never seen one live before. His father is being deployed to put down the lycan revolt as the lycans have resorted to terrorism in order to achieve their goal of getting their country back and free from American forces. And Patrick is now a victim of that very terrorism at 30,000 feet.
Set in an alternate reality, Red Moon is the story of an oppressed minority, lycans, who are forced to take mind altering drugs to prevent them from transforming into their werewolf selves. The lobos, a mutation or plague, depending on your point of view, causes those people who have it to be able to transform into werewolves while humans cannot. Humans and lycans were able to live side by side as long as the lycans took their drugs and followed the “no transforming” laws in effect but some are resisting and have resorted to terrorist tactics in order to achieve more equality and less interference from America.
We follow three main characters, Patrick, and Claire who finds out that her parents were part of the lycan resistance when government agents come to her home, and Chase a governor whose extremely anti-lycan rhetoric and policies come back to haunt him in an unexpected way.
Red Moon is a difficult book to classify. Although at one level it is in the syfy or fantasy genre by creating an alternate reality, it is also a political thriller following an oppressed minority’s fight for freedom and equality from an oppressive regime who fears the minority’s strength and power. It is also a becoming of age story about two young people who try to figure out who they are beyond the labels that they have been given, and are attracted to each other even though they know the risks. I think this attempt to be too many things at once may have been part of the reason that I found the book uneven in places. Although the writing in general was good, there were times when the metaphors seemed to be stretched too thin, the rhetoric a bit too strident and the characters seemed too stiff, especially when they were being used to make some point that was important to the author. However in general it was a good read, and thought provoking as well.
Brenda’s Rating: *** (3 Stars out of 5)
Recommend this book to: Lauren, Ken and Marian
Book Study Worthy: Yes
Read in ebook format.
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