South African writer Sarah Lotz's The Three begins on January 12, 2012--later known as Black Thursday--when four airplanes crash in different parts of the globe. Except for the plane that crashes in Africa, each flight leaves a sole child survivor. The children are dubbed the Three by the media, which go wild with conspiracy theories about how these kids survived such disasters.
In the aftermath, the questions shift from how and why they survived to who they really are: relatives of the children notice they're not quite the same as they were before the crash. Unexplainable things start happening around them--some good, some benign, some creepy. Are these children miracles, harbingers of the end times, aliens or simply traumatized innocents hounded by the media and gullible masses?
The story is presented as a book within a book, a journalist's nonfiction tome called Black Thursday: From Crash to Conspiracy that includes interviews and conversations with people connected to the crashes. Lotz writes convincingly in the different voices of the interviewees, men and women from different ethnicities, regions and walks of life. The sense of dread builds as the characters' paranoia mounts, and some plot twists are shocking. The coincidence of this novel's debut so soon after the real-life disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 only adds to the eeriness. The ending may be frustratingly ambiguous for some, but this epic tale shouldn't be missed. Just don't read it on a plane. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd