Firestorm: The Caretaker Trilogy (review)

Don't stand out, don't distinguish yourself in any way that will draw attention—that's the advice eighteen-year-old Jack has heard from his parents for as long as he can remember. One night he arrives home only to have his father force him back out the door on a seemingly urgent midnight ride, plunging Jack into a puzzle he can't stop running from long enough to untangle. It seems, though, that the people who raised him are not his parents, and he isn't from the small town he knows so well. Instead, Jack hails from the future, where a prophecy indicates that this is the last moment Earth's ecological balance can be tipped toward the good—but only if Jack can find and use the mysterious thing known as "Firestorm." Jack is joined (and then left and then rejoined) by a tricky telepathic canine and a shape-changing female warrior, who must get him in fighting condition so he can defend himself against agents from the dark side. The book rockets through this action-packed adventure with crisp, terse sentences explained by narrator Jack as "a weakness of mine. But I still like them. They generate pace. You want pace? I'll give you pace." Since each step is revealed only as Jack is about to take it, readers will be as unable to predict the future as they will be to stop reading until they discover it, and the fact that this is only the first book in an intended trilogy makes Jack's success an open question until the very end. Inventive situations and curious characters elevate the typical self-discovery/save-the-world plotline, and readers will relish hurtling through the adventure alongside Jack.