A Recommended Summer Read from The Verge and io9
A Recommended June Read from Hello Giggles and Tor.com
When the world ends, where will you go?
In a breathtakingly vivid and emotionally gripping debut novel, one woman must confront the emptiness in the universe—and in her own heart—when a devastating virus reduces most of humanity to dust and memories.
All Jamie Allenby ever wanted was space. Even though she wasn’t forced to emigrate from Earth, she willingly left the overpopulated, claustrophobic planet. And when a long relationship devolved into silence and suffocating sadness, she found work on a frontier world on the edges of civilization. Then the virus hit...
Now Jamie finds herself dreadfully alone, with all that’s left of the dead. Until a garbled message from Earth gives her hope that someone from her past might still be alive.
Soon Jamie finds other survivors, and their ragtag group will travel through the vast reaches of space, drawn to the promise of a new beginning on Earth. But their dream will pit them against those desperately clinging to the old ways. And Jamie’s own journey home will help her close the distance between who she has become and who she is meant to be...
Feels like this one was done plot first, then people, and that’s not the way to write a book for me. I’ve got high expectations for someone named Jamie alone on a distant planet, the end of the world, etc. etc. But all the woman does is feel irritation and resentment. And make stupid decisions. When she’s making any decisions at all. Which is maybe… twice in the whole book. And the story is baffling. This Jamie is alone for all of two days before finding other survivors, but yet she’s a loner, but yet it’s nearly broken her mentally, but yet what she feels towards the fellow survivors is irritation and resentment. Nothing tracks. And not in the good way, where people are complex, unpredictable creatures that contain multitudes. It doesn’t track because the people are wet cardboard cutouts who hop between planets because apparently the plot needs them to.
Don’t get me started on how the sci-fi elements are baffling at best and non-existant at worst. And how that part is still better than the two lifeless “romances.”
The kindest thing I can say is, it’s very much a first novel. And I did refrain, in the end, through sheer willpower, from throwing it across the room.
Reading updates
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Started reading
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2 September, 2017:
Finished reading
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2 September, 2017:
Reviewed