A Measure of Disorder is truly meant for younger readers, 10 to maybe 15 years old. It is not adult fiction that happens to have young characters.

It’s the sort of book that middle school kids would find fascinating, sweeping story, interesting world building, heroic kids, minor relationship issues. The reviews on Amazon by younger readers praise this to the skies.

Author Alan Tucker’s novel has the usual YA flaws:  Things just happen with major difficulties somehow swept aside, kids are smarter and more capable than adults, writing style is somewhat simplistic.  Tucker’s characters act the way kids act:  intensely self-focused, idealistic and easy to manipulate and everything is urgent/now/important/critical.

I didn’t care for the book but was curious enough about just what was going on to read about half way through. But when I got to the section where one group of kids agrees to go back to our Earth and steal toxic (read radioactive) waste to give their “benefactor” an edge, I basically quit. I paged through to the end to see whether our heroine Jenny made it back home, then quit.

From a moral point of view, the Mother’s (as in Mother Earth) view that good and evil, law and chaos must be balanced and that one is not innately better than the other disturbed me. I hope our kids don’t believe that hogwash. It’s also hard to believe that anyone would be gullible enough to steal radioactive waste. Yeesh.

A Measure of Disorder is meant as the first book in the Mother-Earth series. The second book is A Cure for Chaos. I won’t be reading this second book, but if you are middle school you’ll probably love it.

2 Stars