Review: Noah Zark: Mammoth Trouble by D. Robert Pease

• Publisher: Walking Stick Books 
• Release Date: August 13, 2011
• Series: #1 Noah Zarc
• Buying Link: Amazon    Barnes & Noble
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• Book Blurb:
• Noah lives for piloting spaceships through time, dodging killer robots and saving Earth’s animals from extinction. Life couldn’t be better. However, the twelve-year-old time traveler soon learns it could be a whole lot worse. His mom is abducted and taken to thirty-first century Mars; his dad becomes stranded in the Ice Age; and Noah is attacked at every turn by a foe bent on destroying a newly habitable, post apocalyptic Earth.
  
  Traveling through time in the family’s immense spaceship, Noah, a paraplegic from birth, must somehow care for the thousands of animals on board, while finding a way to rescue his parents. Along the way, he discovers his mother and father aren’t who he thought they were, and there is strength inside him he didn’t know he had.

My Thoughts:

I’ve read a lot of YA novels and often found myself unable to relate to the drama they seem to    feel over every little thing. 

That never happened in this book. It’s a beautifully written YA Sci-Fi novel which seems to hit most of the standard archetypes without coming off as stale or trite. I was worried that this would be a religious book in Sci-Fi disguise, but it thankfully never happened. This book starts off with a bang and while it’s pace slows down after the initial attention grabber, but it never feels slow. There are fun Sci-Fi toys, sibling rivalry, parent issues, historic and current animal info, space and time travel, fights, and a light taste of romance. This book never left me saying ‘yes, but get on with the plot’ despite plenty of dialog, descriptions, and explanations. The character interactions are realistic, logical, and likely with one exception. That exception is the relation between the main character, his parents and the antagonist. I found that a little difficult to swallow, but that could be because I am over twice the target audience’s age. I would definitely recommend this novel to anyone in a preteen/young teen target audience with a taste for science fiction.

I felt that there could be more detail, a compliment since I don’t expect the level that I want as an adult in a YA novel. I thought the author did a wonderful job with this book and I’m waiting to see if this becomes a series. 

The reviewer, Liz, received a ePUB from the author for review.