So far this is the biggest contender for "Biggest Disappointment of 2016".



I was so excited for this book, and it's not even that I was too excited that it was a letdown. This book sounded like everything I'd love; an epidemic that wipes out 98% of humanity, and 99% of women. The book opens it up to be this interesting journalistic look into the fall of humanity, of society as we know it. Plus an image of what a world may be like when there are way more men than women, and what that could result

So far this is the biggest contender for "Biggest Disappointment of 2016".



I was so excited for this book, and it's not even that I was too excited that it was a letdown. This book sounded like everything I'd love; an epidemic that wipes out 98% of humanity, and 99% of women. The book opens it up to be this interesting journalistic look into the fall of humanity, of society as we know it. Plus an image of what a world may be like when there are way more men than women, and what that could result in. "The Handmaids Tale" meets "Children of men or even grittier".



It sounded so interesting, great title, won the Philip K Dick award, I was sold. So when I received it from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review I was looking forward to it like crazy.



However, this book was just terribly written. The author says herself in her about me that she "writes like she's running out of time" and honestly, you can tell. This book feels like it wasn't planned at all, that she just wrote everything that came to her mind and shoved it in there with little concern about what it would do to the story. Or she wrote down all these interesting bits, and then shoved them together and said, "it's a book!". It felt like it was supposed to be important, it was supposed to make you see harsh truths and feel uncomfortable. The set up meant it'd explore rape and women as possessions, a chance at a truly powerful story. But it was so empty, nothing important or powerful whatsoever. How an editor approved the glaring issues in this book is beyond me. How it won the Philip K. Dick is even further beyond. I plan on seeing what then other nominations were, unless there were none.



This story opens up in the future when a group of children are given the task of scribing an important series of journals. These journals are known by everyone and have been read by all, they are a sacred window into the early fall of society. The author then goes straight into the expected journal (why have the framework of the kids scribing journals if she wasn't going to have her book be in journal form right?) following a woman who is unnamed (but goes by many throughout the book) who is a nurse and midwife describing the early stages of the epidemic. Society has begun to panic a little as there is a 100% mortality rate in pregnant women, and woman and men are coming down with the fever everywhere. Our story then abruptly changes from journal format (after maybe three paragraphs) and then goes into 3rd person (I'll... complain about this later) and switches back and forth between journal, 3rd person, and omnipresent throughout. Our nurse wakes up on a cot in her break room at the hospital. Supposedly weeks later, as all her food in her home is decaying and moldy. She wakes up with no life support or IV (ok at this point I'll look past this) and wonders into the completely wrecked world. The city is empty and partially burned, looted, bodies all over. She goes home, is immediately almost raped by some random man (cause men get super rapey within weeks, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'll wait till later). Then takes off on a journey to who knows where, encountering few on the way, dressing as a man, and administering birth control to the woman she can find (all slaves and controlled).



That's literally all I can say without spoilers. Also, I cannot contain my rant, sooo let us start with the major issue with this book. The frame the author created using the kids. She set it up to be an important story, she set it up to be a journal. But then she doesn't commit. She ditches the journal nearly immediately, writing in a style that has things the kids cannot know, so what is the point. What's worse is the majority of the stuff in the 3rd person view could have easily been rewritten to be in journal form. Having just finished "We" by Yevgeny Tarteskovy (sp?) which was completely done in a stream of conscience journal form, the whole story, and done well, this bothered me extremely. But giving the debut a chance I convinced myself to look past it. Then the unrealistic start to the story. She wakes up (while admittedly at a hospital) in the BREAK ROOM on a COT, no simple "she pulled the IV out" to make it remotely plausible she was unconscious for a long time. The body can only survive 3 days without water. So without any assistance, she couldn't have been out for longer than 3 days. However when she goes home, her food is rotten, and she talks about how it's been weeks. WEEKS. Okay, okay, I'll look past it, it's a debut, it won an award, it'll get better. Immediately things get rapey. I get it, not a lot of ladies, SOME men will get rapey, but the chance that the first man she meets is rapey after only a few weeks of pure societal collapse seems slim. It doesn't help that nearly every man she encounters is rapey. The character also thinks about men in a TERRIBLE way, a way that if it was being written about women would cause a lot of angry people. The portrayal of men, and thoughts regarding men, just seem like the author is projecting some Man-Hate. I tried to look past this too. In this world, all men are crazy sexual, or maybe the epidemic killed all but the over sexual, rapey, couldn't last a few weeks without sex before becoming a monster people. So now I'm at overlooking two major aspects of the book, and one arguably minor one.



The other HUGE problem with this book for me was the mid-wife herself. I hated her, I could not find any level to connect with her. She was mean, cynical, the kind of person that is judgemental and holier than thou. Rather than just saying she's pan-sexual (I get it, cause I consider myself pan-sexual it's about people, not genders) she thinks " I could educate them about gender fluidity but I doubt they could understand it", give me a break. She thought she was the last real person on earth, she was so full of herself it was sickening. Her actions and responses rarely made sense, and honestly, by the end of the book, she just seemed like a garbage person. She cursed like a sailor and not in a fun way, in a Jesus, you curse a lot way. Which feels weird coming from me (I curse a lot haha). She tried to be fiercely independent but instead came off as stubborn and ridiculous. But whatever, debut, I'll look past it.



So back to the journal. Seriously, what is the point of setting up the book with a framing mechanism, the children transcribing her journals, if you aren't going to stick to your framing mechanism. It didn't help that when she did write in her journal she wrote in a style= terrible= weird weird weird style. No joke, I've never seen so many "=" and she had a habit of repeating words three times. I started to think it was a tick. A sentence would seriously go " Lake house= cool vacation home= raid potential= people, want to avoid people, avoid people, avoid people" it was... obnoxious. I think the author was going for a stream of consciousness kind of writing, but there are much better ways of doing that.



I found myself highlighting multiple passages, not for great quotes but to add a note: "what" "this doesn't make sense" "but that's not what the person is saying at all". One passage literally had a character admit they know that their companions will never come back, only to have her think two sentences later "he refuses to admit they aren't coming back", but... he did admit it, two sentences ago... The book was horribly disjointed. It gets worse when she gets to the Mormon town when she's constantly belittling them for trying to have a semblance of normalcy, it's not that they don't admit to what happened. They call themselves survivors and call travelers refugees and are absolutely aware of what happened, they just are trying to create a town and live again. She seriously spends the whole time going "they're so blind, pretending nothing happened, pretending the world isn't over" literally giving them crap for wanting to find some kind of happiness. I wanted her to move on from this part of the book only to realize I was nearly 80% so this was the main part. I also began to realize that I spent 80% going " I'll overlook this issue and see if it gets better" but I'm overlooking essentially the whole book by this time. It's that broken, I had to overlook everything. I may as well have been given a piece of paper with bullet points of the story.



Shortly after the Mormon town, the book takes a complete and utter dive off a cliff. It has random passages telling what happened to characters she has no way of knowing what happened to, these are done in a god perspective, taking us all over the world, once again rendering the children and that framing mechanism completely useless. Not only this but it got... awkward and explicit. I thought when reviews warned it got explicit that it would be in a "you need to read this and be uncomfortable because this is the reality of rape and sexual abuse" kind of way. But it wasn't. It was in a "she is just a sex-crazed as the men and starts talking explicitly with someone's husband" way. Describing sex and lady bits graphically, and thinking about sex and lady bits, and using unnecessary terms to do it. I'm not an "oooh nooo sex" gal. I read raunchy books, but I am a girl who hates unneeded explicit sex or reference to sex that detracts and doesn't add to the story at all. This literally takes up the majority of the remaining book. If you're going to add explicit sexual descriptions, make it worth it, don't make it random and out of place. This book could have used that to make a point of sexual abuse. But rather chose to play that card for some weird self gratification and obviously just for the, well, sex. It added nothing.



So by the end, nothing important happened. Nothing important enough that every future person would read this book and act like it was important. She didn't encounter enough people to be a good story of the end of the world as we knew it. She didn't learn anything, she was a pretty nasty person till the end. The majority of the book is spent not on what the world is like, but her describing sex to a Mormon guy in detail. Why would that be important to the future? I spent the majority of the book trying to make excuses for the book, and the rest being angry and annoyed. This book was a waste. A wasted chance on a good concept, a wasted chance traded for absolute worthless drivel and characters and interactions that are shallow and unrealistic. The author was all over the place. She had no idea how to put her thoughts together. She wrote the same story as multiple types of books than just shoved them all together. She didn't have a plan for her character. She had a cool title and couple of passages and just tried to make it work. It didn't.



I literally can't think of another book that made me this angry. "The Last One" got close (another amazing concept wasted, but far better written), and was #1 for worst of 2016 for me before this, and everything I've read by Fritz Lieber I've hated. But honestly, this book made him look like a fine author.



This needs to go to an editor and be re-written and 75% of the plot needs to change. Then maybe this won't be a waste of a concept.



I'm done for now with this rant. I've got to move on from this book.



Worst of 2016 for sure.



I'm sure many will go, Oh you're being too harsh, it's great for a debut. Or, It's better than how you write this review is littered with grammatical errors.



But honestly, when do we stop lowering our expectations and ignoring glaring problems for debuts. I've read amazing debuts and bad ones where the author improved later. That doesn't mean we need to pretend the bad one is better than it is because it's first. Also just because I can't write for anything doesn't mean I can't tell bad writing.



If you like this style of book, I swear to you there are better ones out there.