Oisín McGann’s latest YA novel takes a bunch of privileged teens along with military trained authoritarian adults and strands them on an island cut off from the rest of the world. Why were these kids put on this island? We don’t know, and our protagonist, Billy, can’t tell us.
In fact, there are a lot of things Billy can’t tell us. That’s because every kid on this island has a microchip in their brain which sensors what they can talk about. Billy can’t say why she’s on the island, or where she and the other kids come from. (She can’t even swear). We know this because this novel is essentially a journal she keeps on her mind-chip where she records and writes about the events around her.
And Billy wants to tell us everything, she really does. A teenager who strives to one day be a journalist has a story to tell, but what she can’t tell us only adds to the mystery.
This is what this book is in essence. A whodunit. When their monastery is blown up and one of the brothers (a military trained adult I mentioned earlier) is gravely injured, the inhabitants of this small island lose all their food, resources, and communications with the outside world. Hunger, rationing, and desperation ensues and as the brothers/sisters (the adults in charge) add more censors to the kids’ microchips, it becomes trickier and trickier for Billy to figure out what is going on.
I loved the concept of this book. Billy admits she’s an unreliable narrator, but it isn’t her fault due to her censor chip. Everything is a mystery. For example, all the kids, including Billy, go by nicknames. This is very important as this disguises which countries they come from and therefore casts a shadow of what’s going on in the outside world.
What we do know about the world is that it is being ravaged by climate change. If anyone knows Oisín McGann, he has an in-depth interest in the topic (check out A Short Hopeful Guide to Climate Change) and he utilises this within the world-building in effective ways, adding to the disaster the islanders find themselves in.
I also liked how McGann incorporated adults as the authoritarian figures in this book. A lot of YA dystopian novels find ways to get adults out of the picture. In Gone by Michael Grant, adults disappear from those living within the dome. And while Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins certainly has adults, it’s the kids that compete in the games (the first one at least). Don’t get me wrong, these are great books, but I liked how McGann successfully includes the adults making it an intriguing part of the plot. Is it adults versus kids? Or is the line more blurred than we think? We follow Billy as she tries to figure it all out.
McGann also describes hunger in great detail. In fact, I learned a lot about how the body works when it’s starving which adds realism to the story. You really appreciate the desperation of the islanders as the story unravels.
I very much recommend reading this book. I really enjoyed it, and I think it breaks the mould of what we come to expect from dystopian YA novels.
You can find out more about Oisín McGann and Cut off at the Throat here.
This book review is part of a new #Octobooks series. #Octobooks are books associated with authors/guests/members (past and present) of #Octocon, the National Irish Science Fiction Convention. Find out more about Octocon on their website and their socials: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, BlueSky, and Mastodon.
MARK KIELTY 