Blog Tour + Giveaway: Salvage by Alexandra Duncan

Title: Salvage
Author: Alexandra Duncan
Publisher: Greenwillow
Publication Date: April 1st, 2014
Pages: 520
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher/Rockstar Book Tours
Age Group: Young Adult
Genre: Science Fiction

Salvage is a thrilling, surprising, and thought-provoking debut novel that will appeal to fans of Across the Universe, by Beth Revis, and The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. This is literary science fiction with a feminist twist, and it explores themes of choice, agency, rebellion, and family. Ava, a teenage girl living aboard the male-dominated, conservative deep space merchant ship Parastrata, faces betrayal, banishment, and death. Taking her fate into her own hands, she flees to the Gyre, a floating continent of garbage and scrap in the Pacific Ocean. This is a sweeping and harrowing novel about a girl who can't read or write or even withstand the forces of gravity. What choices will she make? How will she build a future on an earth ravaged by climate change? Named by the American Booksellers Association as a Spring 2014 Indies Introduce Pick.

My first reaction when I saw this book was: Whoa, this book is huge! And it is! But what caught my attention was that beautiful cover and once I read the blurb I was intrigued and I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. I've always had this attraction for sci-fi, space and futuristic stuff. I love the concept of how our life would be outside Earth, in space. Duncan created a colorful and detailed description of a future Earth and a future life. I enjoyed the vivid way that the author showed a future society and I like how I was able to connect with the main character, Ava, all throughout the book.

Ava lives aboard a spaceship, where women are only useful for cooking and doing "stuff that women do", they also don't know how to read or write. This one of the aspects that bothered me about the novel because I really don't see the futuristic aspect of keeping women illiterate. Moving on, Ava is to be married with a boy from another ship and she only hopes that is the boy that she has always dreamt about. But when a terrible mistake comes in the way, Ava has to run for her life and this is when everything gets more interesting ( trying to be vague, don't want to give any spoilers). 

There were a lot of details that I like about the novel. I like our main character Ava. I like how she grew up as a character all throughout the story. How she was able to overcome the obstacles and make something of herself. She learned to read and write,she also learned other helpful stuff that she wasn't able to do in the spaceship that she was living. I like how the author was able to create several cultures and worlds for us, all of them pretty amazing and different. I found myself captivated by every place she described. 

At the end everything was wrap up pretty nicely, giving me sense of closure and a beautiful ending for Ava’s story. This book has everything, romance and action. The plot was well developed, I just wish it would have been shorter, I felt like it drag at some points. If you are a fan of Sci-Fi, I would recommend  this book to you. 

Alexandra Duncan is a writer and librarian. Her short fiction has been published in several Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy anthologies and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her first novel, Salvage, is forthcoming from Greenwillow Booksin April 2014. She loves anything that gets her hands dirty – pie-baking, leatherworking, gardening, drawing, and rolling sushi. She lives with her husband and two monstrous, furry cats in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

       

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