Description:
"The multimedia approach to the book is effective at communicating the transformational effects of the war, to which no one is immune. Psychological and body horror given multiple forms, all of them scarring. " -- Kirkus Reviews
When your entire family is caught up in a world war with flesh-eating fog and robotic monstrosities, the only question that matters is: what are you willing to do to survive?
Siblings Kris, Albany, and Millie each inhabit a different part of the war - special ops and cannon-fodder at the front and codeworks behind the line - which transforms and transmutes how they think of themselves and their allegiances. They dump everything they know?confessions and consolations alongside poems for fallen friends and battleground sketches - into letters.
Review Quotes:
"The multimedia approach to the book is effective at communicating the transformational effects of the war, to which no one is immune. Psychological and body horror given multiple forms, all of them scarring." -- Kirkus Reviews
"Kudos to Winnipeg writer Ariel Gordon and local illustrator GMB Chomichuk for their intriguing futuristic novel for young people aged 13-18." -- Harriet Zaidman, The Winnipeg Free Press
"With Blood Letters, Gordon and Chomichuk present a tense recounting of a war at once foreign and all too familiar--a powerful epistolary trek through the personal loves and losses of a single family forced to contend with the manipulation, dehumanization, and disruption that comes to define their lives." -- AGA Wilmot, author of Withered and The Death Scene Artist
"BLOOD LETTERS is an artifact from the future, a jumbled archive of robots, soldiers, dot-matrix print-outs, ID cards, propaganda posters, photos and maps: Human detritus offering hints that something has gone horribly wrong.
Letters fly back and forth as siblings strive to stay in contact in a world at war. This cascade of communication, chaotic attempts at human connection, may ultimately be doing more harm than good. Family letters improve morale, which in turn leads to increased lethality. Love hurts--or in this case, kills. In BLOOD LETTERS, Ariel Gordon asks timeless questions. How do we maintain our Humanity without being absorbed by technology and war? Is survival the best we can do? How can we go on in the face of shock, PTSD, lasting harm and other traumas? Throughout BLOOD LEETERS, poems sustain our heroes. Art, then, shows us a possible way through. Wars end, lessons aren't learned, wars begin again... but even among the destruction, Humanity marches on.-- A.G. Pasquella, author of Welcome To The Weird America, co-editor of Devouring Tomorrow