It’s the future after nuclear war, and life is nasty, brutish and short, at least for a lot of people. Kid is a 16-year old androgynous girl who joins a gang of violent survivors. The gang is led by psychopathic but charismatic Wolf, partnered by an Asian woman, Dolly, and then Pretty Boy and Tank. They pick up and lose others along the way: the rule is that they don’t use real names because they don’t want to get too attached to anyone.  But the point is that they do become important to each other anyway, despite major tensions between them. Trust is hard to come by, especially when the group regularly resorts to eating human flesh. It’s a fast moving plot with death on most pages. The crew keep the tone light with lots of jokes, and since they are engaged in stealing and trading in human meat, as well as raiding towns, that kind of balance is necessary. Kid starts out being pretty useless, but she gradually learns to fight and kill. She also maintains some moral core in this apocalyptic future. There is an overarching plot about Wolf’s group resisting the schemes of another group that is trying to clean up society, and that keeps the book going, although it seems more of a hook on which to hang more violence and close calls. The writing is proficient, and is brought alive in a strong performance by  Stephanie Willis  who reads the unabridged audiobook. Bite has a comic book feel to it, and by this stage science fiction with a young female narrator is  pretty familiar, if not formulaic, but it is an entertaining novel.

© 2016 Christian Perring

Christian Perring is wondering when the nuclear apocalypse will indeed happen.