“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” A young boy raises the alarm as he races through his school. It’s a sharp and gripping opening to Deborah Cholette’s DIGGER: Dig or Die!—an excellent dystopian thriller aimed at middle grade readers. Earth’s air is escaping from a crack in the atmosphere. The only breathable air that remains is near sea level. Any creature above this altitude dies. There is one option in the face of this catastrophe: dig down.
The concept of a literal “red line”—spray-painted by soldiers to mark the boundary between breathable air below and lethal conditions above—is both striking and inventive. Easy to understand and scary to contemplate, it’s a clever visual premise on which Cholette builds her plot. The full horror of the children and their community’s situation is starkly spelled out as the “Red-Line” drops ever further. As protagonist Nick bleakly puts it: “Some looked up the hill and started to cry. A child whimpered ‘Grandpa’. I too looked up the street where the Red-Line would be so low that anyone sleeping on the first floor had probably died.”
Nick and Lily, who share the narrative voice, are bright kids that work out a way to build a network of tunnels that will save their friends and neighbors. The author centers the narrative around children who make use of their small stature to be able to navigate the limits of the “red line.” But more than this, Cholette ensures that they are the driving factor in how the community responds to their climate event. It’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that, in doing so, the author is highlighting how it is the young people of today who will have the grit and skills needed to address the world’s current climate crisis. These are tenacious, determined kids. As Lily states, “I kept telling myself the same thing: if we were all going to die anyway, we might as well die trying.”
Cholette’s prose is finely tuned—perfect for her target audience. It’s clean, crisp, and features simple yet effective dialogue. Contemporary issues such as mental health and bullying are skillfully woven into the story, allowing them to be explored naturally rather than feeling shoehorned in. In addition, a short epilogue gives the lowdown on the real climate science behind the story.
With a very neat premise and memorable characters, Deborah Cholette’s DIGGER: Dig or Die! offers an exciting and educational variation on the dystopian thriller. Fast paced and full of drama, it will entrance readers from middle grade and up.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader