Zeph's father leads his men to Lilly's fishing village to find a lost tech treasure for the secretive Scottish Ambassador and instead kidnaps Prime Minister Randall's seven-year-old daughter, Lexy. Our story has two narrative voices-fishing girl Lilly, accompanied by the psychic seacat she simply calls Cat, and a raider boy known as Zeph, the son of a ruthless tribal leader. In a luddite backlash, technology has been destroyed by the fearful denizens of the southern regions, though Scotland has retained some and is trying to get their hands on more. In Diamand's future, the British Isles are made up of the Last Ten Counties, a region of southwest England ruled by an oppressive Prime Minister Greater Scotland to the north and the warrior tribes (Raiders) who inhabit the marshes along the now-abbreviated southeast coast. But it is also swashbuckling, and this book is middle grade fiction, not YA (though perhaps for the older end of the spectrum, say fourth through seventh grades). Which is not to say that Diamand's vision of the future isn't bleak.

I'm used to seeing that subgenre of science fiction and fantasy dominated by Young Adult writers, perhaps because it tends to be Dark Stuff Indeed. It kind of surprised me to realize that Raiders' Ransom, the start of a series, is dystopian fiction, set in 2216 after rising sea levels have changed countries like England forever. I can't decide which is better, her world building or her characterization. Emily Diamand won the first London Times/Chicken House Children's Fiction Competition with this book, beating out more than 2,000 other writers.

Ways to See a Ghost by Emily Diamand