Elevation 1 The Thousand Steps eBook Helen Brain
Download As PDF : Elevation 1 The Thousand Steps eBook Helen Brain 
Someday I’ll see the sky.
I’ll climb the thousand steps.
The gates will open and my family will be waiting,
ready to take me home.
Sixteen-year-old Ebba has never experienced life outside the underground bunker deep inside Table Mountain, known as the colony. But in a sudden twist of fate she is Elevated to join the elite living on the surface in a post-apocalyptic world.
Was she saved because of the mysterious birthmark on her hand?
The High Priest and his handsome son Hal are especially keen to keep her close, but can she trust them? When Ebba learns she has a sacred task to find three lost amulets to save the earth from a second and final Calamity, it is clear that her life will change forever.
Elevation 1 The Thousand Steps eBook Helen Brain
Living in a colony under Table Mountain, 16 year old Ebba, accepts that her life is to work along with the thousands of other children with a vague promise that some of them will be the new generation to populate the post-apocolyptic world. Others who are thought to be defective, will be sacrificed. Unexpectedly she is elevated to the outside world and discovers the meaning of the birthmark on her arm and the amulet she wears. Her freedom comes at a price and she is thrust into a position where she must make choices. Choices that will affect her friends and the world as she knows it.Although written for young adults, as an adult I thoroughly enjoyed this book; reminded me of 'The Hunger Games' in style. Helen Brain's writing is descriptive and pacy. I'm looking forward to giving copies to my grandchildren for Christmas.
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Elevation 1 The Thousand Steps eBook Helen Brain Reviews
First off, I must add, that Helen Brain's The Thousand Steps (the first of her Elevation trilogy) has scored what I think is quite possibly the best-looking cover for South African youth literature that I've seen in a long, long time. Wow. It's the kind of book that just begs to be picked up and admired.
The story itself stood out for me because while it plays on the usual "chosen one" riff that is so common in SFF, it does so with originality and nuance that I find is so often lacking in the genre. There's a lot going on under the skin.
Ebba den Eeden, our protagonist, starts out life in an underground bunker, where she and two thousand other young people are set to work shifts producing food for their community. Or so they think. She's led to believe that the world outside their bunker has been destroyed during a great cataclysm. That is, until she is miraculously "Elevated" at the eleventh hour before her execution, that is. (A rescue in the nick of time that seems awfully convenient, if you ask me.)
Ebba's Cape Peninsula is vastly different to the one we know today, and I loved seeing an environment I know defamiliarised. The higher sea level means that the mountain chain of the region has become a string of islands, and the communities living there have a hard life food is scarce and the disparity between the haves and the have-nots is tremendous.
Coping with this sudden turnaround in her world, from being but a lowly drudge to one of the elite, is not easy, and while on one hand I felt that Ebba herself lacked agency in book one, this was, I believe, in keeping with her character development – she is way out of her depth and struggling to know her place and understand the power that she can wield.
Yet her intentions are good, even if her naïveté is painful, and though I cringed often as I saw her trying to navigate this society in which she found herself, her words and deeds come from a good place. It cannot be easy for a girl who's followed orders her entire life to kick against an authoritarian regime has infiltrated nearly every facet of the people's lives. Ebba is very much in a gawky phase in this story, where she hasn't fully grasped her power – so expect her to make mistakes and flounder a bit, and for others to take the initiative.
There are some lovely secondary characters, like Isi the dog and, of course, Aunty Figgy, whose special brand of magic happens in the kitchen. The world Helen conjures up feels tactile, as if it could possibly just exist in a slightly left-of-parallel universe. Yes, yes, in case you're asking, there is a kinda love triangle. Well not quite. But you'll have to see. I did feel as if the love interest was a bit quick on the draw, but then again there's a lot happening, and we get to the end of book one at a rapid rate.
I must add that much of book one does come across like an extended introduction to the setting, giving us all the main players and an indication of conflict – so don't expect any closure. There are loads of threads left hanging, and I'm looking forward to seeing how Helen will weave them together.
Where Helen shines is that she has a keen eye for understanding how people interact, especially in the subtexts of non-verbal communication, and indirect characterisation, which she brings across often so poignantly. There's a part of me that wishes the story could have been expanded, so that we could've dug deeper. (Though this may also be due to the fact that I'm used to reading doorstoppers, so don't mind me too much.) My biggest criticism was that the action sequences felt a bit rushed, glossed over and cause-and-effect not quite established, but the the sheer depth and breadth of her well thought-out world building, and an entire mythology to unpick, more than makes up for this.
My verdict This is a super awesome story. It reads quickly, and there's much to unpack, and I'm looking forward to seeing where Helen takes this. Five bats squeaking out of auntie Nerine's hat for The Thousand Steps.
A fantasy dystopian read suitable for younger YA readers and reluctant readers, with plenty of action and easy to follow, simple writing.
Ebba has lived her whole life underground, worked half to death, believing that she and her fellow prisoners are survivors of a terrible Calamity. All they know of the earth outside is that no human can live there and that the god Prospiroh will only allow the strong to survive. When Ebba is saved from being culled because of a strange amulet she has had since she was abandoned as a baby, she is forced into a new and very strange life.
While the Calamity has changed the earth and set humanity back, it is a lie that it cannot support human life, and Ebba discovers that she is the sole heiress of a lush farm...and a host of stranger things. Silly and naive, she is easily manipulated by the above grounders about her, who see her as a pawn, and with her lands, a treasure to be bartered amongst themselves.
On the other side of this, there are strangers telling Ebba that she's the last scion of the goddess who made the world, and that she is meant to gather sacred amulets and restore the goddess to earth.
While Ebba starts off annoyingly dim, she grows and shows her strength and her better nature as the story progresses. Elevation is the first part of a YA series, and many questions are left unanswered in this installment as is usual in the genre. One thing I found very different was how Helen Brain set the story up as the usual real world post-apocalyptic dystopia (it is set in a future Cape Town, South Africa that has been flooded and split into islands), but also crosses it with more typical secondary-world fantasy fare - including a whole new mythology and creation myth.
Older YA readers and adult fantasy readers looking for something more complex are not the target audience, but even within the confines of the genre, the author has tackled heavy-hitting subjects and the theme is strongly egalitarian, encouraging young readers to not simply trust a government that elevates one caste higher than the others, and makes slaves of another group for the "good of the people".
Set in a time when all of the Cape Peninsula apart from Table Mountain is submerged by the sea, this book is about children who live in a colony deep inside the mountain. It has all the elements of a teen fantasy novel drama, love interest, enemies and a quest that is barely started by the end of the first book. But I really enjoyed how Helen Brain describes the social setup, religion and politics of the society, which was strangely unfamiliar, even to a South African. I look forward to introducing my 10 year old daughter to it, and reading the rest of the series.
Living in a colony under Table Mountain, 16 year old Ebba, accepts that her life is to work along with the thousands of other children with a vague promise that some of them will be the new generation to populate the post-apocolyptic world. Others who are thought to be defective, will be sacrificed. Unexpectedly she is elevated to the outside world and discovers the meaning of the birthmark on her arm and the amulet she wears. Her freedom comes at a price and she is thrust into a position where she must make choices. Choices that will affect her friends and the world as she knows it.
Although written for young adults, as an adult I thoroughly enjoyed this book; reminded me of 'The Hunger Games' in style. Helen Brain's writing is descriptive and pacy. I'm looking forward to giving copies to my grandchildren for Christmas.
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