It follows the tried and tired formula for a while, and Koli is exactly just as annoying as you’d expect a protagonist of such a story to be.

Honestly, this book starts out as nothing special, following in the footsteps of familiar YA formula - a young person in a stagnant dystopian place that limits his education and ambitions, with a unrequited love interest, a coming-of-age ceremony and an unexpected secret that opens his eyes to the world and changes his life in exciting ways. And by the same token, them as think they’re ignorant think it because they can see the edges of what they know, which you can only see when what you know is tall enough to stand on and take a look around.” “I learned since then, and paid a price to learn it, that them as lay claim to great wisdom most often got nothing in their store but bare scrapings. In any case, Koli comes across some knowledge and a piece of tech that has the potential of upending the status quo in the ways this country bumpkin never even thought possible. Maybe it’s coincidental that all the glorified Ramparts come from the village’s richest family for generations, maybe not. Koli is a young man - 15 at the start of the story - living in a 200-people strong village of Mythen Rood (the future version of present-day Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire, England), a place where wealth and power resides in the hands of the Ramparts - those few to whom the ancient tech responds, allowing them to protect the village from trees, rats, drones and shunned men. This is unspecified-time-in-the-future “Ingland” (part of what was once known as “Yewkay”) where, fed up with climate change, trees become bloodthirsty predators and regressed humanity huddles behind tall walls in ever-shrinking villages, relying on bits and pieces of still-functional old world tech that might as well be magic for all they know, and rarely venturing out to places even four miles away. “You would most likely die!”Nah, you certainly don’t hug trees in Koli’s world, unless you are acutely suicidal. “Why would anyone hug a tree?” I stammered out.

The book of koli series