Herbie Brennan
Balzer + Bray (2010)
ISBN 9780061756474
Reviewed by Ben Weldon (age 12) for Reader Views (10/10)
“The Doomsday Box: A Shadow Project Adventure” by Herbie Brennan is the story of teenaged Danny Lipman and his friends as they travel through time to save the world. One day at a secret government base, an ancient alarm went off that started the countdown to the apocalypse. Danny and his friends Michael, Opal, and a new agent, Fuchsia, were called in for a new mission. The fate of the world depends on them. At an old abandoned air force base, a branch of the CIA had built a rift in time/space which would allow a person to go wherever and whenever they wanted. Through this rift, a small, shattered vial emerged that contained a sample of the Black Death. The plague quickly spread and Danny and his friends were forced to go back in time and prevent the samples from coming through. Can Danny and his friends avert the impending pandemic?
Soon after the vial entered through the rift almost everyone was dead. The world’s only hope was Danny and his friends. After they entered the rift, they were on a plane to cold war-era Russia looking for “agent Cobra” who was responsible for sending the deadly vial. Once they got to Russia, Michael and Opal were captured by the KGB (the Russian secret police). Can Danny and Fuchsia rescue their friends and find Cobra before they too are captured?
The Shadow Project is a joint MI6 and CIA run operation. It uses psychically tuned teenaged spies that can separate their consciousness from their physical body. They then use this “astral body” to explore and report information from enemy territory. Danny once used this power to scout for his friends in a high security KGB prison.
I would recommend this book to people who like action, adventure, and science fiction. This was a really good, fast-paced book that was full of intrigue. The book is the second in a series. You could easily understand the book without having read the first one. “The Doomsday Box: A Shadow Project Adventure” was a real page turner and you won’t want to put it down until you finish it. Elements of this book were actually based on real history.
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