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Daniel Buitrago on 09 Oct 2016
“Isla Negra is an island located near Costa Rica where everything has become special and certain living creatures are strange and dangerous. That's the place where Boy X takes place.

When Ash McCarthy wakes up in an aseptic room, connected to some kind of sanitary system, feeling that his sensory perception has changed, he becomes more confident and able to do anything. All his senses have sharpened and he has experienced physical changes which Isabel, his fellow sufferer, has also noticed. It just feels as if a foreign substance runs in his veins.

Ash, whose father has just passed away, will go through frantic hours, trying to save his mother's life. She is confined to the BioSphere, a scientific institution in the island, because she has been inoculated with Kronos, a deadly virus that, if released, will cause death to millions of people. There's an evil plan plotted by some men "Cain, Pierce and Thorn", to destroy life. Ash and his new friend Isabel are going to try to prevent them from taking Kronos out of the island, which is the same place where all the research, the virus, antivirus and the vaccine have been carried out. Everything must be kept in Isla Negra: that's the difficult mission to be accomplished very quickly.

Isabel's good knowledge of the island is a great advantage, to which we should add Ash's new strength and capacities. They must blindly trust one another, despite being new acquaintances and knowing that things are not always as they seem.
The book cover gave me clues about what this story could be. It was a new novel by Dan Smith, but it also promised to be something different from what I had already read in his previous books. 'My Friend the Enemy' and 'My Brother's Secret', narrated a story set in the past, related to the world wars. That's why the reader would probably miss the historic aspects in this novel, which is something that I've always enjoyed very much. However the reader, and me too, have gained other fantastic things: pure action, a wild jungle scenery, fantasy applied to science and to one of the most sinister faces that it implies.

Boy X is basically a race against time. Everything must be solved within 24 hours and Ash's mother saved. It is very important to get the antiviral called Zeus or a terrible disgrace will hover over Humanity.

It's clear that Dan Smith has made a great effort to accurately describe the jungle, its sounds, the light, its smells and the effect that it all produces on the protagonist. This novel is full of those sensations, quite far from another sort of reflections that would make the development of events to be delayed somehow, even having some recurring thoughts or voices that come to Ash's mind very often. During this countdown, the urgency is mixed with great adventure, truly physical, for which skill and cunning is required. For Ash this is definitely an initiatory journey which will help him to realize that he is able to operate in a hostile environment. These two youngsters will be inspiring for both young people and adults because of matureness.”