This gentle ode to a teacher’s skill at inspiring, encouraging, and being a role model is spoken, presumably, from a child’s viewpoint.

Of Nell's experiences and encounters only the acquiescent Lucy seems the figment of an adolescent male (and pretty weak) imagination the rest is compellingly chilly, and real as tomorrow's breakfast.Ī paean to teachers and their surrogates everywhere. The plagueorphaned children whom Nell takes in early on, and who seem destined to break through his protective numbness, age and die before his eyes the other survivor, probably around his own age, who sends out his address by balloon, turns out to have hanged himself shortly before Nell's arrival-a real jolt, this, but one that shocks Nell into seeking others and when Billie at last lures him away and tries to kill him, Nell and Lucy pass up the chance to get off on their own, instead taking her back into their lives despite the likely risk and certain aggravation. Most impressively, Christopher repeatedly confounds one's expectations of an easy out. Christopher is well known for his post-Disaster science fantasies, but this totally credible adventure, set in a very immediate future, requires no imaginative reorientation. Nell experiences the one-day fever but somehow escapes the hideous second stage, a swift premature aging process from then on he goes methodically about the business of survival, finally tracking down two girls-gentle, passive Lucy with whom he comes to a romantic understanding, and hostile Billie, her companion, who bitterly resents his homing in. There he finds a strange world of fear and suspicion, where friends can be enemies and people will do anything to survive.The disaffection Nell develops after his parents and siblings are killed in a car crash probably helps him through the next disaster, as his grandparents and then, it seems, everyone in the world is killed off by a plague that first hits the aged and then works down. The sickness is a strange one, affecting only the adults and none of the children, and soon Neil finds himself an orphan once more.Īlone, Neil travels to London in search of other survivors of the plague. After killing thousands of people in India in just a few months, the disease begins to spread much farther, quickly sweeping across the world and eventually settling in the same village where Neil resides. Soon, a devastating illness, the Calcutta Plague, begins making the headlines. He is sent to live in a small village with his grandparents, whom he loves but doesn’t really know. Neil’s world is shattered when he and his family are involved in a horrible car accident that leaves him an orphan.

When Neil survives a deadly plague and plunges into solitude, he must question everything in this gripping adventure from critically acclaimed Tripods author John Christopher.

Empty world by john christopher