Recently, I finished reading The Fallout, a 328-page fictional book by S.A Bodeen who worked on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. She graduated from UW-River Falls with a degree in Secondary Ed. Later on she joined the peace corps with her husband. They went to Tanzania in East Africa. S.A Bodeen’s first picture book was published in 1998 and called Elizabeti’s Dolls. Her first YA award-winning book was The Compound which came out in 2008. The Fallout is the second book to The Compound. I chose this book because I really liked The Compound so I wanted to see what would happen in the second book.

The Fallout is about Eli and his brother Eddy who want to take over his Dad’s business called YK. But until they’re older they will not be able to take over the company so for now they just have to work for YK instead. Luckily Eli’s family is still super rich. One day Eli and his family go out for the day. But they have to stay disguised of course. Later that day they find out they’re being followed by someone. They don’t know the person following them but Eli’s guess is that they work for YK or Eli’s family as a security guard or someone. Eli doesn’t know who’s following their family or why but Eli does know they got inside information somehow. Eli is the only one in his family who knows someone is following them.
There’s also another big part to this book. It’s Lexie wanting to find out who her real parents are. Lexie was adopted at birth by Eli’s family, and now Lexie is determined to find out who her real parents are. Lexie needed someone to help her so she asked Eli to help. No one else knows except for Lexie and Eli about Lexie wanting to find out who her real parents are. The only thing is how are they going to find Lexie’s real parents? Lexie found her birth certificate, not saying who the names of the real parents are, but it did say where she was born. Now all they have to do is get to the hospital where Lexie was born and look for the birth certificate in documented files. This might seem easy to do, but really it’s not. They’ll have to make fake names, and get a ride from someone besides their personal security driver so Eli’s family won’t find out. They’ll also need to sneak out of the house unexpectedly which is probably the hardest part. The big question for all this is will they make it to the hospital and find out who Lexie’s real parents are? That’s a mystery you’ll have to find out by reading this book.
The last big part to this book is about Phil and taking over the YK business. Eli has and still is trying to find evidence to put Phil in jail or demote him from being the leader of YK. Eli had stolen a flash drive of Phil’s but couldn’t find anything on it that would show he was in contact with Eli’s Dad at the time of when Eli’s family was trapped in the compound. Eddy thinks Phil is loyal and trustworthy but the rest of the Yanakakis think different. The reason why most of the Yanakakis’s didn’t trust Phil was because they knew that Eli’s dad had some sort of person who communicated in the real world, and Eli and his family think it’s Phil. So now the question is, was Phil an outside communicator with Eli’s dad? Or is Phil trustworthy?

I’d probably suggest this book to young teens around my age and tweens, ( in between kid and teen). I’d suggest this book to this group of people because it’s too long of a book for little kids but it’s not hard to read for young adults and adults. I liked this book better than the first book honestly. I liked this book better than The Compound because it had a lot of mystery to the book and a lot of suspense which I really liked. I liked how they put three kind of big plots to the book which made it really interesting. I chose this book because I read the first book (The Compound), so I wanted to see what would happen in the second book.