The Rule of Three

Finished March 17
The Rule of Three by Eric Walters

This teen novel is set in Mississauga in the near future. On an ordinary spring day, computers across the world suddenly stop working. That means that anything that uses a computer also stops working. Adam's father is a pilot and should be flying back home from Chicago later in the day. His mother is a police officer in charge of a local division and will be busy dealing with the emergency situation. Lucky for Adam, he has an older car, one that predates the use of computers, and his is one of the few on the road still working. He and a couple of his friends swing by the elementary school to pick up his younger siblings, and make their way home.
Adam's next door neighbour Herb is retired from a federal government job, and immediately sees the potential for the situation to get worse. He and Adam's mother turn into the leaders in their community, as they put together a group of people to defend, supply and assist the whole neighbourhood to move forward with hope. Adam turns out to have skills useful to the community as well, and as his character develops, he learns some hard lessons and teaches others to value community as he does.
This is a novel with an interesting dystopian situation, and these novels that seem rooted in the possible always seem the scariest to me as they can be so close to our reality. This novel begs for a sequel, and I'd like to see how this community survives and how the characters move forward as well.