Hello World 5000

(Copy provided to The Kindle Book Review)
From Goodreads:
“Hello World 5000 can be called a "children's story," if you're a child, that is, who's either secretly or noticeably intelligent, slightly on the sad side, possessing a fine vocabulary, and who has perhaps even grown embarrassingly tall and has a job. The story begins with a boy named Royal. Royal was named after a typewriter and raised by "The Master," Eduardo Aquifer XXVII, the last in a 500 year old line of unpublished authors who runs St. Millar's Writing Academy for Illiterate Orphans, and where Royal and Olympia, the two main protagonists grow up together. Upon leaving St. Millars, Royal joins the other children of the region who travel the Wire like an undersized French Foreign Legion, along the way delivering cargo without asking questions and trying to evade Feudal Lee, the orchestrator of The Big Dark, as they call the revolution that both evicted parents from their lives and broke history, replacing it instead with the programs run on the Wire. As they travel the Wire they encounter other Digital Natives. At each of these orphaned tribes border they face a Gulag, a challenge which if they are lucky enough to pass through takes them to the Keep, and then the Tell where a Wisenhut (a schoolroom) connects to the Wire and brings a new lesson, development, or death. What is their cargo? What happens when they reach Zero Pole at the end of the Wire, and what does a world without parents look like? Are bedtimes good or bad? Who can raise children better, the state or parents? All these questions and more are raised and answered in this exciting, funny and dangerous book. Read it or die."

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Hello World 5000 is impossible to define. It could be a very difficult read, dealing with thousands of children ripped from their parents and muddling through a seemingly post-apocalyptic world, but the narrative is utterly ruled by whimsical storytelling, leading the reader through a whirling dance of eccentricities that occasionally drops to present a serious picture, then takes off again. Reading it was enjoyable, though a slower experience than I'm used to, because I had to wade through the explanations for the compacted eccentricities on every page and the back stories for almost all the characters.

Backstories are completely necessary in this story, though it was disappointing not to have a clear explanation for The Big Dark or how Feudal Lee came into power. And yet, I grew to love the characters. As I have usually found in these kinds of stories, the main character (Royal) is a bit null, while the colorful secondary characters swirl and dance around him. Hunt masterfully uses flashbacks and just a smidge of foreshadowing to round out each character's story, like streamers winding around a maypole—with a similar sense of barely controlled mayhem. Sometimes, he even tells the readers what the characters are about to do, which adds a little delight to the sometimes-heavy narrative. On the other hand, the conflict's resolution wasn't complete—the children seemed to be in a good place, but what happened to the antagonist? Inquiring minds would like to know.