Spill Zone by Scott Westerfeld (review)

Three years ago, a devastating event known as the Spill altered the world; while the book doesn’t specify what that event was, the effects are clear in the photographs that Addison takes. Addison just wants to care for her younger sister, Lexa (silent since the Spill), who spends most of her time with a creepy doll, so Addison takes pictures in the Spill Zone and lets a dealer sell them off to collectors. When one collector tracks Addison down and offers her an extraordinary amount of money to retrieve an object from the Spill Zone instead of just taking a pic, the decision to do so may change everything about her and her sister’s life. There’s a lot of setup in this first entry in a graphic novel series, but the protagonist is gripping from the first page and patience is richly rewarded as a fuller picture of how this post-Spill world has evolved slowly emerges. Puvilland’s illustrations are vivid, even calculatedly garish on occasion, giving readers a cold shock of unfamiliarity and highlighting the abundance of horrors and mysteries that exist in this world. It’s clear from the movie-ready visual images that the illustrator is primarily an animator, and the panels are a worthy match for the clever, memorable text. Offer this to Westerfeld buffs and graphic novel fans and to readers who can’t get enough of dystopian near futures.