The book the Year of the Bomb by Ronald Kidd definitely wasn’t meant for 8th graders, but it was an interesting book to say the least.

The book starts off with a mysterious case of three people going missing in a sandbox and when the police go to check it out, they disappear too. All of a sudden they all come back, but they are all acting different.

The main characters are Paul, David, Crank, Oz, and Annie. These are the characters that figure out that the people that disappeared weren’t alright. They were getting controlled by “Pod People.” They are in the 1960’s so they don’t have any current technology to help them prove themselves. They started off their search by talking to the people that disappeared. They all seemed really calm but they all had a bump on the back of their necks. The kids assume the worst and are horrified by their assumptions and begin to tell people. When the Pod People find out, they try to take the kids and implant the mind control chip in the back of their necks. The kids also find out about the massive underground nuclear bomb through searching a underground hidden lab. The group also finds out about how many people have the chip in their neck, almost half of the town. The Pod People come and corner them in the underground lab, when it looks like all hope is lost, they find an escape exit which leads to this valley. While running away, David confesses his love to Annie. They escaped and told the FBI who was helping them. The book ends with the friends hanging out while Paul has a chip in the back of his neck.

This book shares how important it is to not see everything in a surface view. Without digging deeper into their pod people problem, their city was at stake, but other then that, there isn’t much substance to this book. All of the characters are lacking depth. The only things are that Oz is the smart one and Annie is the girl. The author’s way of putting in the David and Annie seemed random and not needed. The ending of the book was basic “everyone lived happily ever after” except the reveal of Paul’s chip in his neck.