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Fuse | March 27, 2013

by Julianna Baggott (Grand Central Publishing/Little, Brown and Company Books for Young Readers, Feb. 2013)

In a genre typified by brutality, Julianna Baggott’s Pure trilogy manages to stand a doll’s head above the rest. After detonations wipe out most of the planet, those who survive are left irreparably damaged down to their DNA, scarred, and permanently fused with the creatures and objects that surrounded them during the blasts. The core cast of characters includes Pressia, a girl with a doll’s head for a hand; Bradwell, a boy with birds fused into his back; and El Capitan, a military commander whose brother is melted onto his back like a maniacal jockey. They inhabit a world clogged with ash, torn to ruins, and haunted by nightmarish fusions of man and beast, and creatures formed from the very dust on the ground. All of this stands in stark relief against the Dome—the last bastion of the rich and affluent of the Before, who live oblivious to the outside in an antiseptic, Orwellian bubble.

Fuse is the second in the series, and reading the first is recommended. Echoing the harsh, survivalist world in its pages, Fuse wastes little time holding its reader’s hand before the protagonists are plunged headlong into the action: battling robotic spiders, commandeering an airship, and following the only Pures to have ever escaped the Dome as they return to lead the revolution from within. Yet, for all its wretched violence, ‘Fuse’ is just as much about the quiet moments in-between where our heroes lick their wounds, catch their breaths, and share a moment of humanity.

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