Book Review: SYLO by D.J. MacHale
Tucker Pierce is warming the bench at his high school football game on Pemberwick Island off the coast of Maine. In the final minutes of the game, the team’s star player scores the winning touchdown–and dies. For no apparent reason. Later that night, Tucker and his brainy friend Quinn are taking a bike ride around the island when they witness what looks to them like an unidentified flying object exploding.
A couple of weeks later, a second mysterious death happens during a boat race, and within minutes the Navy arrives. Specifically, a unit designated SYLO which quarantines Pemberwick Island due to the possibility of a virus. But two deaths in two weeks doesn’t seem to warrant this large a response, and SYLO begins to act very suspiciously. Not getting any answers from adults, Tucker and Quinn begin snooping….
This young adult novel is the first in a trilogy, and is in the dystopian/post-apocalypse subgenre, though it takes most of the book to get there.
I feel I need to talk about spoilers to express some of my feelings about the book, so those will come at the end of the review, and I will give you ample warning.
The early chapters do a good job of ramping up to the first appearance of SYLO, and introduce us to the cast that will carry us through most of the series: Everyman Tucker, smartass Quinn, Tori the standoffish lobster boat girl, obnoxious small town rich kid Kent, and flirtatious tourist Olivia. We also get SYLO’s leader, Captain Granger, and the mysterious and probably untrustworthy Mr. Feit.
After that, though, the book just keeps on piling on the mysteries as it becomes increasingly clear that whatever SYLO is up to, it doesn’t involve a virus. If SYLO is there to protect the Pemberwick residents, why are they abducting people? What are the black skyships? Does the performance-enhancing drug The Ruby have any connection to anything else going on? And what does SYLO even mean? Only one of those questions gets answered by the end of this volume, and only sort of.
There’s a lot of concealment of information for the sake of concealing information, which pads out the story between action sequences.
I found the book adequate and no more, and do not plan to read the rest of the series. I think junior high boys will find it far more interesting, particularly if they like Mr. MacHale’s Pendragon series.
SPOILERS!
I was frustrated by SYLO’s very poor approach to operational security. If you have known for several years in advance that something is going to happen at a particular location, to the point that you’ve sent in deep cover agents, those agents should have established who on the island is a good bet for bringing into the loop once the operation begins.
In particular, the bright, inquisitive teenagers that are the offspring of the deep cover agents should have been told enough of the truth on the first day to keep them from going off the reservation. They might even have been able to help!
Instead, SYLO keeps everyone in the dark, alienating the islanders and sending the kids off on what is almost certainly a wild goose chase as the apparent enemies of SYLO look like innocent victims. The only adult who will give out clues is Mr. Feit, an aggressive drug dealer who’s straight out of a public service announcement about don’t take drugs, kids. And he’s lying at least half the time.
We get a lot of unnecessary drama and at least two sympathetic characters die because SYLO doesn’t know how to make allies. It all feels contrived so that this story can be stretched into a trilogy.
