Eighteen-year-old Joshua ‘Kid’ Jones is living in the year 2078. The world having been destroyed by numerous pandemics, climate change, dirty bombs, and floods is polluted and you need special tablets to go outdoors to stop you inhaling the polluted air. He is also an Offliner living in Piccadilly Circus Tube station with his cell of other Offliners, including his best friends Pas and Eliza.

Most of the world now lives a virtual life in a place called Perspecta run by tech company Gnosys Inc so that they can have all the comfort and joy of living in a beautiful world but only virtually. The Offliner’s choose not to be ‘plugged in’ and live technology-free. They are hated by the tech company that wants to eliminate them all.

After a conversation with his Godmother about him changing the past, Kid goes searching for what she means and finds an old iPhone 11 that he had forgotten his father had given to him. It is with this phone and using Instagram that he first makes contact with Isabel Parry who is in 2021. After some persuasion and evidence, she believes that Kid is from the future.

If he is to change the world as it is now, Kid needs Isabel’s help in 2021, the year Gnosys Inc start trading to help him. But he also finds out some interesting and vital information about his father who disappeared when he was a child that may just help their plight too.

What can I say? Kid is such an astounding time traveling journey. It reminded me a little of The Matrix with people being plugged into a virtual world but with a far easier-to-understand plot!!

As well as being a fascinating, unique, and engaging adventure set in a world where Mother Nature has fought back after years of abuse, it is also a dystopian novel that opens your eyes to the destruction that we are causing now to the planet. It certainly makes you stop and think.

I love the sci-fi elements of the book which were not too scientific that they lost me. I also loved the way Sebastian has taken his readers on a complete journey, starting with the main character and then through short chapters introduced us to different elements of the story and the people before reaching the pinnacle moment of Kid and Isabel meeting and their stories in both 2021 and 2078.

I was a little unsure how I felt about the size of the book given that it has 600+ pages and it was also the first in a trilogy, however, I flew through it and didn’t want to put it down. There are also pages of DM messages between Kid and Isabel to take into consideration too which take up quite a few pages.

This is a book that I can see making big waves in the Young Adult market. I can also imagine some big film company snapping this up for a movie or series as that is how it felt reading it, it was as if I was watching the action play out rather than reading it. It truly is a breathtaking book written by a debut novelist and I now can’t wait for book two. Bring it on!!