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by Mike Mullin
Many visitors to Yellowstone National Park don't realize that the boiling hot springs and spraying geysers are caused by an underlying supervolcano. It has erupted three times in the last 2.1 million years, and it will erupt again, changing the Earth forever.
Fifteen-year-old Alex is home alone when the supervolcano erupts. His town collapses into a nightmare of darkness, ash, and violence, forcing him to flee. He begins a harrowing trek in search of his parents and sister, who were visiting relatives 140 miles away.
Along the way, Alex struggles through a landscape transformed by more than a foot of ash. The disaster brings out the best and worst in people desperate for food, clean water, and shelter.
When an escaped convict injures Alex, he searches for a sheltered place where he can wait - to heal or to die. Instead, he finds Darla. Together, they fight to achieve a nearly impossible goal: surviving the supervolcano.
With nonstop action, a little romance, and realistic science, debut author Mike Mullin tells a mesmerizing story. Readers will turn Ashfall's pages breathlessly, and continue to ponder Alex and Darla's fate long after they close the book.
"In this chilling debut, Mullin seamlessly weaves meticulous details about science, geography, agriculture, and slaughter into his prose, creating a fully immersive and internally consistent world scarily close to reality." - Kirkus Reviews
"The book is well written and its protagonists are well-drawn, particularly the nontraditional and mechanically inclined Darla. Although more appropriate for older teens due to its violence, this is a riveting tale of survival." - Publishers Weekly
"Mike Mullin's Ashfall glows and throbs with everyday life and the business of survival in a dystopic future, after an unthinkable disaster." - Richard Peck, Newbery Medal winning author of A Year Down Yonder and Three Quarters Dead.
"The scariest apocalypse is one that could really happen. Mike Mullin's Ashfall is way too real for comfort: you'll live the panic and despair and know that all of this could really happen. It will be a long time before you get the taste of volcanic ash out of your mouth. This isn't fantasy, this is real." - Michael Grant, author of Gone, Lies, Hunger, and Plague.
"Ashfall is the perfect book for reluctant teen readers who 'can never find anything good to read.'" - Dave Richardson, book reviewer for the International Reading Association's Reading Today, and children's literature professor at Cincinnati State College.
"This is riveting. Fans of post-apocalyptic thrillers like The Hunger Games will love Ashfall." - Cinda Williams Chima, Author of The Exiled Queen and The Warrior Heir.
This information about Ashfall was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Mike Mullin's first job was scraping the gum off the undersides of desks at his high school. From there, things went steadily downhill. He almost got fired by the owner of a bookstore due to his poor taste in earrings. He worked at a place that showed slides of poopy diapers during lunch (it did cut down on the cafeteria budget). The hazing process at the next company included eating live termites raised by the resident entomologist, so that didn't last long either. For a while Mike juggled bottles at a wine shop, sometimes to disastrous effect. Oh, and then there was the job where swarms of wasps occasionally tried to chase him off ladders. So he's really hoping this writing thing works out.
Mike holds a black belt in Songahm Taekwondo. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and her three cats. Ashfall is his first novel. Visit his website at www.mikemullinauthor.com.
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