Floodland

Product Information

Marcus has also received two Printz Honors, for Revolver in 2011 and The Ghosts of Heaven in 2016, giving him the most citations to date for America’s most prestigious book prize for writing for young adults.

On Norwich, we meet our main character, Zoe, who lost her parents as the last they got away on the last boat but Zoe got left behind.We particularly liked linking William Blake's poem 'Little Girl Lost' to the book and creating our own tribal dances for the Eels, Cats and Horses. Reading this during the coronavirus pandemic, there are a lot of parallels: fear, concern for the future and one's own survival, who you can trust or be close to.

I love Marcus Sedgwick and his writing style and this being his debut novel was clearly a stepping stone for his future work to come. For my opinion, the ending of the book was a little disappointing, because it ended like on the middle of the story. Well, if the country got smaller when the sea rose, then there ought to be more people squashed into what's left.When I first saw Floodland on the shelf, I was intrigued by a storyline from the climate fiction genre. A middle-grade short novel about a post-global-warming world in which much of what was England is now under water.

Also, I think this book was mainly focusing on how the water is getting higher and lands getting smaller. A girl named Zoe is left alone by her parents in the ruins of Norwich, which has become an island where food and water are becoming increasingly scarce. Along the way she ends up at another Island where she gets herself into a tricky situation and well I won't spoil any more. She finds a small boat, more or less seaworthy, trapped in the oozing mud, and determinedly digs it out. I'd had it for ages but didn't know where I was going to use it until the character of Edgar came along: "I suspect I may have fleas again".The writing on the other hand was not the best, I feel like the emotions could have been shown better. His books have been shortlisted for over forty other awards, including the Carnegie Medal (seven times), the Edgar Allan Poe Award (twice) and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize (four times). It felt like it could have been fleshed out much more than it was; honestly it reads more like an outline of a story rather than the finished product. Floodland is a challenging novel for older readers who will be captivated by a vision of the future that is not so unbelievable.

And it gave me fresh impetus to go back to the next YA novel, Revolver, with renewed determination to be gloomy! An easy and quick read that is set in the near future where global warming causes sea levels to rise, which then causes floods. Sedgwick's writing is as usual top-notch, literate and engaging, with characters who come to life on the page. Like Zoe, I would have liked to know more about what happened to all the people: 'Why aren't there more people here? She lands on tiny Eels Island, where she must survive in a nightmarish world run by wild children and their boy-leader, Dooby.As it gets warmer, glaciers in the North and South Pole are melting, and it becomes water which makes the ocean bigger. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.