Please enable JavaScript
The Headmasters | LitPick Book Reviews
The Headmasters
The Headmasters
Top Choice

How do you learn from the past if there isn't one?

Sixty years ago, something awful happened. Something that killed everyone except the people at Blue Ring. Something that caused the Headmasters to appear. But Maple doesn't know what it was. Because talking about the past is forbidden.

Everyone at Blue Ring has a Headmaster. They sink their sinewy coils into your skull and control you, using your body for backbreaking toil and your mind to communicate with each other. When someone dies, their Headmaster transfers to someone new. But so do the dead person's memories, and if one of those memories surfaces in the new host's mind, their brain breaks. That's why talking about the past is forbidden.

Maple hates this world where the past can't exist and the future promises only more suffering. And she hates the Headmasters for making it that way. But she doesn't know how to fight them - until memories start to surface in her mind from someone who long ago came close to defeating the Headmasters. But whose memories are they? Why aren't they harming her? And how can she use them to defeat the Headmasters?

Maple has to find the answers herself, unable to tell anyone what she's experiencing or planning--not even Thorn, the young man she's falling in love with.

Thorn, who has some forbidden secrets of his own . . .

Buy a copy of THE HEADMASTERS Now

Book Details

Genre: 

  • Science Fiction

Age Level: 

  • 12 and up
Profile Picture

The Headmasters is a young adult science fiction novel set one hundred years in the future. The story is told from the main character, Maple's, point of view. Blue Ring, where Maple lives, is inhabited by Headmasters, a species of bug that arrived sixty years prior, after an event that wiped out all other human life on the planet. The headmasters are a parasitic species that attach to the back of their human host and control their actions. When a host dies, their headmaster is transferred to a new host.

Profile Picture

Maple is a member of Blue Ring, a community in what was once Canada after an unexplained global event that left those in Blue Ring among the many survivors. Those in the Blue Ring survived by coupling themselves with those called the Headmasters. Parasitic aliens fused onto the bodies of humans and controlled their thoughts and actions. Each Headmaster fused with different humans before finding another body. This becomes problematic when Maple begins to share memories and consciousness with the former host body, a woman named Zara, whom Maple had a previous connection with.

To add your comments, login above or request a LitPick membership.
RECENT BOOK REVIEWS