Exodus, by Julie Bertagna

Raphaëlle Garcia

3eme Bleue

Book Report

Exodus, by Julie Bertagna

Exodus is the story of a young girl, named Mara. She has just turned fifteen in 2100 and is living on a small island, Wing, in the North Atlantic. She lives peacefully, staying indoors most of the time because of the constant storm which ravages her island. To kill time, she uses her cyberwizz, which gives her access to the Weave, a world of electronic litter, data and lost technology.

But the seas are rising and her island is about to drown. Then one day, as she is using the cyberwizz, she falls out of the Weave and lands in a place called Nowhere. There she sees in the distance new, huge cities that human built to escape the flood. At that very place, she meets a cyberfox, who tells her that the cities really exist and that he lives in one of them: New Mungo, in Eurosea. She returns to the realworld unexpectedly against her will. The following days, she searches again for the cyberfox in the Weave, in vain.

Now convinced there are new cities across the ocean, she and the whole island cross the seas. After a weekly journey they arrive at New Mungo, but they are stuck outside the city wall as the inhabitants of New Mungo, called the sky people, will not let them enter. The city wall was in fact built to keep refugees out. During the time they are stuck outside, her best friend dies of sickness and she learns that her family died during the journey. Mara is overwhelmed by sadness. As she is about to lose all hope, she finds a way to get into the city, with the help a little sea urchin, that she calls Wing, in memory of her island.

After crossing the city wall, she finds an almost drowned world above which the sky people live in an upper city above it. She meets more little seas urchins and also the Treenesters, people who live in trees. Their island is about to drown as well. She still cannot find a plan to save her friends, who are stuck outside the city wall, when Wing and a Treenester, Gorbals, are captured by the sky people to be enslaved. Mara leaves the drowned world to rescue her friends.

When she arrives in the sky city, she finds a completely different way of life: people travel around the city in tunnels using zapeedos (sort of rollerblades), they eat synthetic food and sleep in sleep pods, which are basically pink coffins. Most of the sky people work in the cybercath, a giant cathedral, where they enter the Noospace which is the Weave but with a different technology. They have no notion of the future or the past and they do not know about the slaves, the drowned city or the city wall keeping the refugees out.

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