posted on 25 Jul 2024

Terra Electrica: The Guardians of the North by Antonia Maxwell

12-year-old Mani sits huddled in a cave living off the last jar of pickled rat. She’s waiting for her father to return from a hunting expedition – he promised he’d return but he’s days overdue. Mani’s mother is dead, killed by the strange disease that has been unleashed on humanity following the final melting of the ice-caps – a disease that turns the victim’s eyes into flashing orbs. It kills quickly.

As civilisation crumbles, Mani and her father leave their home and find salvage in the cave but now Mani has been left alone and she has difficult decisions to make – does she stay and wait and risk starving to death or leave and try to find wherever it is her father has gone?

So starts Antonia Maxwell’s Terra Electrica: The Guardians of the North, a story about how a young girl faces a dystopian future and emerges as a potential saviour of humanity. 

Mani finds an unexpected ally in Leo, a scientist who has been left behind in an almost abandoned research centre and slowly, bit by bit, the two come to depend on each other – even though their relationship comes under considerable strain as the two of them battle to find salvation.

We discover that this new disease, that manifests itself through the extraordinary lightshow in their eyes, came to the Earth via a rock (a meteorite?) that emerges from under the melting ice-cap. It feeds on electricity – sucking the lifeforce from wherever it finds the power, and that includes humans. Leo has discovered that in order to survive he has to stay clear of all things electrical but when he shows Mani her reflection in a mirror, the young girl is horrified to discover that her eyes too crackle with the deadly lightshow. She’s infected!

But there’s something very special about this vulnerable little girl. The disease isn’t killing her, she doesn’t seem to be able to pass on the disease like everyone else and, more importantly, it seems that she’s able to cure others with just a touch.

Mani finds escape from the terrible world outside by putting on an ancestral wooden mask that takes her to a world of her animal spirit guides which help her to understand her fate and give her strength. She’ll need all the help she can get as it emerges that she is potentially the saviour of humanity…….

This is the first book in what will be a new series of adventures in this near-future semi-dystopia and if you get on board now I’m sure you’ll be sticking with Mani’s future adventures.

Published by Neem Tree Press, you will be able to get a copy from your local independent bookshop – who will be glad to order it for you if they don’t have it on their shelves.

 

Terry Potter

July 2024