Strange Tomorrow

One of my favorite young adult post-apocalyptic tales! Jean E. Karl's Strange Tomorrow, about a girl named Janie who is with her dad and little brother in an underground facility when everything on the surface of the world is vaporized by aliens. The dad is overcome with despair and hides in his room while Janie and brother use a radio to try to contact survivors. Then there's a second half set about 60 years later with a community of survivors start to spread out to repopulate the earth, with a girl named after the first Janie as a healer. There are also two "sequel" type books set in the same universe, The Turning Place--a set of brief stories from several different time periods after Strange Tomorrow, and But We Are Not of Earth, set in the far future, as humans explore the universe.

After surviving a mass wipeout of all life on earth from Clord, a distant planet, Janie, her brother and her father struggle to keep life on Earth sustaining. They were lucky enough to be underground in a stronghold that was prepared for a disaster like this. After five days of endless snow, it all suddenly melts on the sixth day, and they come out to find a barren wasteland, stretching over all the ends of the earth. The story then jumps a couple hundred years ahead, to when the great granddaughter of Janie lives with others who descend from her. She and the others who live with her take up the customs of settling into valleys, planting trees and grass and raising crops and livestock They face many hardships, such as lack of a certain material like clay or seemingly endless droughts, but they manage to conquer them all. This is a great story that imagines the future of earth and what earth may come to face. One thing that makes this story pretty good is the way it describes the tragedy of being a sole survivor on all of earth. Emotions set in on the reader as you imagine being only one of three survivors and everyone you have ever known was gone. A feeling of vengeance burns in your heart, and an unbreakable will to keep earth alive and get back at the enemy pushes you beyond your limits. Janie keeps her head in reason while her father falls into a deep depression, and she manages to bring her father back to reality as they find other survivors. Another good thing about this story is the way it switches points of view. It switches from Janie's point of view of the disaster that killed nearly the entire population of earth to her great-granddaughter's story of trying to keep the earth sustained. In the first Janie's story, her main concern was dealing with her sibling brother while being stuck underground for over five days. She later faces the problem of Clord's attack on Earth. The second Janie's first problems are having to be parted with her best friends as they are separated into different valleys to life-or-death situations, like properly treating a broken leg or arm. This story also flows smoothly as it transitions from one thing to a completely different event. At first it describes how much Janie was hating having to go to "some underground place" with her little brother and over-strict father for three days. Then she changes her concerns to the unending snow that was building over ten feet high, and also the sudden loss of all radio communications. This is an excellent science fiction that is unique in many ways. It doesn't have the usual alien invasion or space exploration. It has a political tension between two different planets and the threat of war. This unique story is ranked high among middle school books. I.Leung (vin)