In the middle of the Atlantic, four hundred miles west of Bermuda, the eight thousand passengers and crew aboard the cruise ship MS Cypress vanish into thin air. Everyone—men, women, and children—all gone. Taken.
Everyone except five teenagers.
In an instant, their seven day cruise becomes a nightmare: eighteen decks of haunted hallways, pools and bars completely empty, desserts still half-eaten in the abandoned Royal Promenade. A ghost ship the size of a city, sailing blind. At least their annoying parents are gone.
But now strange things are happening. Satellites are dropping out of orbit, falling from the sky. Satellites…and bigger things. They’re not as alone as they think. A message appears in an ancient language, burned into the carpet in the deck ten elevator lobby. It’s a warning. A monster lurks onboard, hunting them. What they’ve long suspected appears certain: the vanishing…it was an attack.
Now the most unlikely of friends must confront the shadowy pasts that link them and regain control of a runaway cruise ship, crack a four-thousand-year-old mystery, and wage war on a formless evil…before they too vanish into oblivion.
"Five teenagers find themselves alone on a cruise liner after the other eight thousand people vanish and their struggle to work out why it happened."
Reviewer: Angel for Bookangel.
Triton tells the story of what happens when five teenagers find themselves alone on a cruise liner after the other eight thousand people vanish and their struggle to work out why it happened.
Five teenagers, wake up from their cruise one morning to find that everyone else has vanished. Eight thousand people suddenly disappearing in a flash. Brynn and her brother Cedar, Jake, Naomi and Sky find themselves floating alone with no clue as to what happened. As they investigate further, it appears that every living creature on board, from the humans to the fish in the aquarium have gone, and all at the same instant. As they struggle to understand what has happened, they find that not only might there be something else on board, but that the meteorite that fell nearby might hold a bigger secret than they first thought.
It's an interesting concept, everyone vanishes where they shouldn't be able to leaving people to wonder what happened and the tension through the book is kept high as they struggle with their own survival. At the beginning, the characters are pretty unlikeable, actually make that really awful, which does make you wonder why you should care or even continue with the book. However, I was mildly surprised to find that the characters did grow through the course of the story and if I wasn't necessarily rooting for them at the end, I was indeed curious to find out what was going to happen to them. The one thing I really did like about the book is that the teenagers and their actions felt real as they tried to survive.
Overall, this is a book that takes it time to really get started and give you some reasons to care about its protagonists. Once that happens and the plot begins to unfold, it becomes an interesting read, with a few thought provoking moments, certainly once they begin to understand what might have happened.
This book was recommended by a bookworm friend whose opinion I trust, although I'm probably the last person who would willingly choose anything remotely sci-fi like. Thankfully the scientific bit at the start was short, and actually quite interesting. I didn't have any problem getting into it, and the writing was engaging enough to keep me reading. I am not sure if this was meant for a YA audience, but either way I would definitely recommend people give it a go.
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