Horizon (Scott Westerfield)

Horizon
The Horizon series, Book 1
Scott Westerfield
Scholastic
Fiction, MG Adventure/Horror/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Boston middle-schoolers Molly, Javi, Anna, and Oliver are excited to travel to Japan to compete in the robot soccer world championships. Yoshi dreads reuniting with his stern father in Tokyo after a falling-out with his American mother. Twins Kira and Akiko are going home from a European boarding school. Caleb has his own reasons for being on the jet.
None of them make it to Japan.
As they are passing through the Arctic circle, something terrible and inexplicable happens to their plane, a bolt of energy that tears through the cockpit and cabin and rips the jetliner apart like so much cardboard in the sky. Only the eight kids are left by the time the battered wreck lands... not on Arctic ice, but in a tropical jungle that's like nothing they've ever heard of. The plants are more red than green, the wildlife's peculiar, and there's a bizarre artifact with strange properties among the wreckage. Where are they? What happened to their plane? And how are these eight kids, few of whom have any practical wilderness survival skills, ever going to get back home?

REVIEW: Yet another impulse borrow from Libby, Horizon promises adventure and danger and strange wonders, and delivers in full.
The core characters are part of a middle-school robotics team, turning their engineer mindsets to the bizarre landscape and its weird wonders and dangers, finding good use for their knowledge of physics, but there are some situations where the scientific method isn't practical. Yoshi's background has a few more practicalities, though it's his love of anime and manga that leads him to step up to the challenge, realizing that the first thing that you do when you find yourself in a strange world is secure your survival basics: food, shelter, and water. Caleb is clearly used to being a leader through physical presence alone, being the oldest and biggest of the survivors/castaways, though while he initially comes across as a "dumb jock" type of limited usefulness, he turns out to have needed skills, as do they all (well, almost all - Oliver, the youngest of the group, doesn't really have a particular talent, though his inclusion in the flight and ensuing disaster give his older robotics teammates something else to feel guilty about, as they're the ones who talked his protective parents into letting him come on the trip). The setup and the setting offer a nice, interesting, and dangerous challenge for the kids, an impossible tropical jungle that may not even be on Earth for all they can initially tell (the mystery of where they are is resolved in this book, though of course a lot more questions remain). Everywhere they turn they find new dangers and new strangeness, all of which sometimes feels like an intentional puzzle or test and sometimes feels like the evolutionary indifference to human survival that makes deep wilderness so inherently dangerous for the unprepared - such as kids who literally fell out of the sky into a jungle with little more than the clothes on their backs. Naturally, despite some friction and different ideas of how to proceed, everyone must come together to survive... and not all of them make it to the end of the book.
From a fairly quick start, the action and intrigue keep up to the very last page... a last page that promotes the associated Horizon app game. (I admit to smirking a bit as the audiobook faithfully read aloud the instructions for downloading and activating the game, including the copying of symbols in a particular sequence as seen on the printed page. C'mon, audiobook producers - did nobody honestly stop and think that maybe you could cut that useless bit out?) I came very close to adding an extra half-star, but there were a few places where Westerfield played coy with information and reveals that barely held it back (though the Good rating obviously means I still enjoyed it, of course). I expect I'll track down the next book in the series at some point, as I'm definitely curious about where things are going.

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