Hatch: The Overthrow, Book 2

Teens are locked away, sedated, tasered, shot at with guns, restrained, and threatened with experiments and experimental surgery. Teens are stung by venomous bee-birds on purpose and studied. A main character's parent dies. Another character's parent almost dies from alien animal attacks. A teen is thrown from a train and presumed dead. Others go missing, and another is kidnapped. Soldiers and guards die in giant alien bug attacks with some gore with descriptions of one creature liquefying tissue and sucking it out and another eating people whole. A dead body is found with plants growing out of it. Some killed by sound waves in the brain. Talk of the thousands dead from the plants and new invading animals and from a bee-like bird bite that's venomous. People are moved to "spray zones" where alien plants have been killed and make panicked trips to superstores to buy supplies. Mentions of abductions and rape.

Brief kissing and some innuendo.

"Crap" and "frigging," "hell," and "dicks" used rarely.

Parents need to know that Hatch is the second book in the sci-fi-horror Overthrow trilogy by Kenneth Oppel, the acclaimed author of The Nest and The Boundless. It deals with alien plants and animals that take over the Earth and kill tons of people with threat of an all-out invasion from more advanced aliens. That's in the background for the first part of the story, however. First, the teen main characters and others like them are locked away, sedated, tasered, shot at with guns, restrained, and threatened with experiments and experimental surgery. In the one experiment performed, the teens are stung by venomous bee-birds on purpose and studied (they all survive). After that, the bugs attack and there's some gore as soldiers are eaten whole or their tissue is liquefied and sucked out through their abdomens. A parent of one main character dies and another almost dies. Teens visit a superstore and watch people panic-shopping, which may be a little too close to home for some kids who have ridden out the coronavirus pandemic. The three main characters to have vastly different ways that they handle their crisis situation, but still maintain a strong friendship. They all wonder, and readers will too, what makes them human and what it means to hold onto their humanity with all the changes they face.