I love dystopian novels. The possibilities are endless when it comes to the future. I love technical things, where math and science fuse with creativity to make a strange "maybe it could happen" novel. For a debut novel, I enjoyed this one quite a bit. Appalachian Trail by Tim Wellman was an adventure, full of mystery, suspense, and enough steampunk mechanisms to make an engineer cream their pants. 

In this novel, we find the characters in a dystopian future where all old electronics will never work again. Oil is worth far, far more than gold and there is no centralized government. Bandits roam wild over the wastelands between independent city-states. There are people known as Dark Children who were born during a period of death nearly two decades before. All of them remained small, slender, have gray hair, and purple eyes. They are also all geniuses like the world has never seen. People distrust them and they are all treated like second-class citizens. 

Pip is a dark child and Seb is a professor. Together, they embark on a journey to find more oil and make themselves rich beyond their wildest dreams. Along the road, they meet others who want to share in their adventurous undertaking, while also protecting them from the many perilous places that lie between them and their goal.