Empty [Kindle Edition]

Suzanne Weyn (Author)

Book Description

A dystopic look at what happens to one American town when all the fossil fuels run out...

It's the near future - the very near future - and the fossil fuels are running out. No gas. No oil. Which means no driving. No heat. Supermarkets are empty. Malls have shut down. Life has just become more local than we ever knew it could be.

Nobody expected the end to come this fast. And in the small town of Spring Valley, decisions that once seemed easy are quickly becoming matters of life and death. There is hope - there has to be hope - just there are also sacrifices that need to be made, and a whole society that needs to be rethought.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 7–10—Everyone knows that we will eventually run out of oil. Weyn takes readers 10 years into the future to the small New York town of Sage Valley to show just how that might feel. Gwen, Tom, Carlos, Niki, Brock, Hector, and Luke have the same problems as many typical teens. Outsiders Gwen and Luke have never known their father and now their mother has gone missing. Rich cheerleader Niki is trying to choose between two guys. In their world, though, gas is 40 dollars a gallon and rising. America has invaded Venezuela, the last country on Earth thought to have oil reserves. Food and medicine are scarce, the economy is a shambles, electricity can't be counted on, and now Hurricanes Oscar and Pearl have combined to form a superhurricane that is headed up the East Coast. Weyn's future has a grimly plausible feeling to it that will draw in readers. She does resort to a deus ex machina to save the day, and the characters and situations aren't fully fleshed out. Still, this should be of interest to those who appreciated Saci Lloyd's Carbon Diaries 2015 (2009) and Carbon Diaries 2017 (2010, both Holiday House) and any teens who wonder just what the world that they will inherit might look like.—Eric Norton, McMillan Memorial Library, Wisconsin Rapids, WI
(c) Copyright 2011.  Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

From Booklist

In a not-so-distant future, the U.S. is at war with Venezuela over dwindling oil reserves, and global warming has created a super-hurricane causing destruction up and down the East Coast. In the gloom that is the end of the world, several teens are trying their best simply to survive. Gasoline is scarce, electricity comes and goes, and there is very little food to be had in the wake of the storm. Gwen, abandoned by her mother years ago, is trying to evade authorities looking for her brother, who was selling black-market gasoline; rich-girl Niki, whose father lost his job, has never had to face adversity in her life; and Tom, an all-around hero who lost his father to an illness, complete the love triangle. Though the characters and dialogue are sometimes routine, the realistic and thought-provoking scenario is packaged into a speedy read, and given the popularity of dystopian fiction, it should find an audience. Grades 5-8. --Shauna Yusko

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• File Size: 259 KB
• Print Length: 196 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0545172780
• Publisher: Scholastic Press (October 1, 2010)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B004D39KQA
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #143,352 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #13 in Books > Teens > Education & Reference > Science & Technology > Ecology

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 47 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Out of Gas November 7, 2010

By Orianna VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

I tried twice to read this book, and each time I made it a little further. I got about halfway before giving up entirely. So, why did I give up? Well, no disrespect toward the author, but honestly? The book reads like a cross between a sermon and a textbook, with the occasional bit of dialogue thrown in so it could technically be called a novel. I'm not kidding, characters will walk up and out of the blue just start lecturing on how everyday products are manufactured using petroleum, and how with the oil reserves depleted, you can no longer buy cosmetics, or batteries, or hairbrushes, and you can't run your heaters or bathe anymore, and, oh my gosh, no one ever saw it coming! Or someone will start talking about solar generators or wind power, and again, it literally sounds as if they're reciting from a textbook.

I'm nearly halfway into the book, and nothing has happened. A few teenagers are crushing on each other and everyone is grumbling about gas costing $80 a gallon, and how they must walk to school, and the girls can't wash their hair or wear their contact lenses, and the cafeteria is closed because they can't afford to power the refrigerators. There's no one saying, "Hey! Let's start building a windmill in the backyard!" There's no one DOING anything about the problem. They just stand around and mope or whine or get drunk. By this point in the novel, I would expect SOMETHING to have happened. I get that there's no oil left, I understand the people are suffering without their iPhones and their blow-dryers. I get it. But how many chapters do we need of these teenagers grumbling about it? Plus, there are so many different teenage characters that I can't keep them straight. It switches between them, but there is nothing to differentiate them from one another, they all sound exactly the same. It makes it impossible to care about any of them, because I can't tell who they are.

I know people hate it when someone reviews a book that they haven't finished, but I gave this book an honest shot. I tried twice to finish it, and I just couldn't bear to slog through any more. And that's really saying something, because I LOVE "end of the world" post-apocalyptic stories! I think the idea is an excellent one, and I think the author could probably write a really great story if she brushed up on her characterization, dialogue, and plot.

I give the book two stars because the idea IS an interesting one. People SHOULD be made aware of how many items in their everyday life are based on oil, and how crippled the word would be if the oil reserves ran dry. That said, this novel is not the way to go about educating people on the subject.

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot January 16, 2011

By Ana Mardoll TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Empty / 978-0-545-17278-3

I'm a greenie in good standing - I know the difference between "recycled content" and "post-consumer recycled content", I avoid petroleum based products as much as possible, and I drive as little as possible. Even if I hadn't been interested in doing these things for my own health and the health of the planet, it's been good sense to wean off of petroleum products ever since the market started demonstrating just how volatile it really is. So I'm all in favor of a good dystopia novel that can drive home just how dependent America is on oil and how dangerous that dependency can be, but "Empty" by Suzanne Weyn is NOT that novel.

The writing in this novel is atrocious - major plot points are "summarized" at the ends of each chapter with newspaper articles that sound fake, unrealistic, and rushed - as if the author couldn't be bothered to edit them properly before going to print. The entirety of the novel is told from the point of view of several teenage "everymen" characters - all of whom sound identically bland - and the "action" of the novel unfolds by having supporting characters literally walk up to them on the street and lecture them about how dependent we are on gasoline and why the world is rapidly going to heck in a handbasket. The cardinal rule of writing - "Show, don't tell" - is broken on every single page of this novel; for instance, in order to demonstrate how the hot water in our pipes relies on gasoline to heat it, we do NOT see a character wash her hair and get a nasty surprise when the water is ice cold. No, instead we have a character *announce* that she's going to wash her hair so that another character can TELL her that the plan won't work, and why not. This is boring, unimaginative, and reads like a badly-written religious tract.

"Empty" is set "ten years from now", but the author seems not to understand what this might entail. She seems to want a story where everything is going along fine and then *BAM* gasoline shortages, but this would mean that either (1) the story would have to be longer in order to really explore the concept of petroleum shortages, or (2) quite a lot of the shortages would have to be jettisoned from the plot entirely. You see, if all oil were gone tomorrow, we wouldn't immediately run out of shampoo (there's a lot stored up in warehouses waiting to be sold), but the characters of "Empty" *must* run out of shampoo *immediately* after the novel starts, so the reader is flat-out told that the high school girls have been hoarding shampoo and nail polish for awhile now. In the same vein, electricity rationing has been going on in town, if only because people can't afford to run the heat and A/C constantly.

But if rationing has been going on for some time, why does the sudden blackout slam the characters into complete, dumbfounded confusion? Where are the candles and the non-petroleum shampoo? One step further, where are the candle making equipment and the shampoo home recipes? Why does everyone in the area have a gasoline- or lithium-powered generator, but no one has ever even HEARD of a manual- or wind-powered generator? And why, WHY, do all the teenagers have holographic cell phones that they use constantly?

What's most frustrating about "Empty" is the lost potential. I'd LOVE to see a dystopia novel where everyone breaks out their vague memories of "Little House on the Prairie" and of childhood boy scout lessons, and then people start experimenting with boiling water on the charcoal grill for bathwater, and figuring out how to cook food in their fireplace, but all we ever get from "Empty" is lectures masquerading as dialogue, teenagers crushing on each other, and everyone being completely clueless and helpless. It's strange and inhuman to see half the people in town unable to get to work or school because it's "too far to walk" and no one even MENTIONS the possibility of bicycles, not even as a handwave to support the plot (as in, "wow, it's too bad all the bicycles were destroyed in the Great Two-Wheeled Cataclysm of 2020!"); at least not until everyone is shepherded into New Utopia Village where everything is clean and self-sustained, and bicycles are magically dispensed from a company grant. (I'm really not making this up.)

Words really cannot describe how disappointed I am with this book. Everything about this book - the characters, the way they interact, their responses in a crisis, the newspaper articles, the very world around them - comes off as completely unreal, totally fake, and poorly written. The subject of oil dependence is an important one, and it deserves a better novel than this. The problems with oil dependence should be *shown* to the reader, not baldly told to them by supporting characters in between the snogging sessions of the "main" characters. I honestly feel that this novel was rushed out to take advantage of the market and the "greenest" thing to do would be to not buy it at all.

NOTE: This review is based on a free Advance Review Copy of this book provided through Amazon Vine.

~ Ana Mardoll

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Poor Writing December 20, 2010

By bunnyrabbit4 VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

I like authors who work with current topics, especially when they write for the teen or older child, but this story just doesn't get off the ground and the writing is overstated and repititive. There is too much "telling" and "over telling" when what is needed is either simple narative or interesting dialog. She describes a scene, allowing us to understand by the description what someone is feeling and then ruins it by telling us what the person is feeling, sometimes twice. The world in peril idea is not worked into the story in an emotionally engaging way. It is described rather than experienced and there are no unique ideas, twists or turns expressed here. I finally had to put this one down after several attempts to finish it.

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