Review: What do I do now sergeant?
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 27, 2013
Nick Cole expands on his dystopian vision of the world in "Savage Boy." Much like "The Old Man and the Wasteland" which precedes it, Boy presents a totally disfunctional United States. There is no manufacturing, no government and no society. It's all about survival. He starts off the tale with the boy, who has a withered left side, ministering to the needs of his dying friend Staff Sgt. Presley. Cole doesn't let too much detail slip. This is character-driven as seen through the eyes of the Boy, who has grown up, the reader discovers, on the run with Presley. The soldier had been with a last-gasp regiment of the U.S. Army fighting off the West Coast invasion of the Chinese. His beloved I Corps had sent a team across the country to see if any government remained in Washington D.C. The rest of the group died. Presley continued despite getting into battles at nearly every turn. He even spent a couple years enslaved by the nasty remains of what had been the human race. He meets the Boy along the way. We're not told when or how. The Boy doesn't know. And most of what the reader learns of the sergeant is from his voice, speaking from Boy's memory. Presley spent all those years drilling Boy on everything from survival and fighting techniques to spelling and book learning. The Boy takes up Presley's quest to return to I Corps in Oakland to see if they're still alive and tell them nobody else is. What he finds is more conflict that doesn't exactly tell him who he is, but he learns quickly that he has to get involved. The Savage Boy doesn't have any slow parts, but it's not for the weak spirited. This is not a rosy picture of the future. Boy's life is hard, and although he fights on, the challenge to continue tests everything he's learned.