THE DARKEST PATH

Fifteen-year-old Callum Roe is caught up in the second American Civil War.

It’s 2026, and the United States is once again fragmented. Federal forces are at war with the Army of the Glorious Path, which includes most of the former Confederacy plus additional states, including the southwest, Alaska and Washington. The Path—a militant and religiously fundamentalist organization—in which women are robed and veiled “companions” ministering to the men—is dedicated to being “a light in the darkness and the rod that falls upon the backs of the defiant.” Cal, captured by the Path six years previously, is set to move up from novice to citizen when Capt. Monroe reneges on a deal, and Cal instead becomes Pvt. Callum Roe in the army. When he kills a man to protect a dog, he becomes a runner, off the Path, intending to journey across the war-torn country from Arizona to his former home in New York. Cal’s first-person point of view offers the immediacy of his personal experience in this action-packed drama, but unfortunately, it isn’t up to offering the fuller social and political history of the war that many readers would find interesting.

An intriguing vision of a possible future rooted in current politics and wrapped in an exciting tale of war.