Carrie Mac is an award-winning author who has moved too many times to count. For now, she lives in Pemberton, a very small town nestled in the mountains north of Vancouver. Carrie Mac's first novel The Beckoners won the Arthur Ellis YA Award, is a CLA Honour book, and is being adapted for film. Her contributions to the Orca Soundings series continue to get reluctant teens excited about reading. She is available for school and library presentations, and has been known to hold the interest of a couple hundred teens where others have failed. Maybe it's the tattoos.
www.carriemac.com

Carrie Mac's profile page

Bb's profile page

The Droughtlanders (The Triskelia Trilogy)

Summer 2006 VOL.29 NO. 3 Lisa Doucet is a bookseller at Woozles in Halifax.

The Droughtlanders (The Triskelia Trilogy) written by Carrie Mac Penguin Group (Canada) 0-670-06545-5 (hc) $25.00 for Grades 7 and up

Carrie Mac’s latest novel, The Droughtlanders, is the first book in her new fantasy series, The Triskelia Trilogy. The Keylanders are the world’s elite people who live in walled cities, or Keys, and who ensure that they are able to maintain their comfortable lifestyles by controlling the world’s rainfall. They have learned the art of redirecting the weather patterns, ensuring that they have access to all the precipitation that they need while the rest of the world gets none. The raindeprived lands between the Keys has consequently become known as the Doughtlands, and its disease-ravaged citizens, the Droughtlanders.

As Mac introduces readers to this world, we discover it through the eyes of Eli, son of the Chief Regent of the East Key. Eli has only ever known the comforts and privileges of life in the Keys, and has little more than pity mixed with contempt for the filthy, contaminated Droughtlanders that live beyond their walls. However, his whole world changes when he learns that his mother is a rebel leader of the Droughtlanders. Then, before he can fully make sense of this revelation, she is killed in a bomb blast, an explosion that his father engineered. Consumed with grief at the loss of his mother, Eli knows that there is no future for him in the Keys, and runs away to the Droughtlands where he plans to find Triskelia, home of the rebel sect to which his mother had devoted her life.

Although set in a fictitious world, this book still includes those same elements of love, loss, friendship and self-discovery, while also casting a different light on family relationships. Eli learns more than he ever could have imagined about his family, but so too does his twin brother, Seth. Seth has always hated Eli and mocked him as a coward and a crybaby, and has always dreamed of being in the militia, destroying the Droughtlander rebels and making their father proud. Both boys discover truths about themselves as they learn more about their Droughtlander roots, and they each make their own discoveries about the importance of friends, even when those friends are not necessarily the ones they would initially have chosen!

H The Droughtlanders (Triskelia)

Eli must learn the truth about his family and their segregated world. Seth pursues his twin brother with one aim in mind… The first in the trilogy of futuristic fantasy and social realism.