The idea of the book was intriguing, and I do enjoy a post-apocalyptic/end-of-society book without much gratuitous violence. (Station Eleven, anyone?) However, while I was drawn in by the premise of this book, I didn’t think the book went far enough with its story.
Due to human negligence and severe weather changes, human society moves underground in order to attempt to survive. Jesse, his sister, and their mother abandon their father to move underground before it’s too late. While Jesse seems fine, his sister won’t stop trying to run away to find their father. Decades later, Jesse is alone and still underground with no one for company but for a talking dog he discovers and smuggles into his living quarters (since dogs are now food.) And as he is alone with a talking dog, he begins to make up fairy tales to tell the dog so they don’t lose their minds (although one might argue that he already has.)
I thought the fairy tale angle was interesting. Unfortunately, I thought that they started too late in the book to come across as anything but random. Why did the author use fairy tales as a coping mechanism? Yes, there was a book of fairy tales holding up the bed that he had taken from home that we are told his father used to read from, but so what? The reader never saw any of this happening. Maybe the father should have made up fairy tales at the beginning of the book to help his children cope with the extreme changes that were occurring all around them? Perhaps Jesse should have told stories to his sister when they were younger and went underground? Why weren’t the fairy tales a bigger deal earlier? Why weren’t there more of them?!
I liked the author’s writing, the characters (for the most part) worked, and the general idea was new and different. I think I understood what the author was going for and it was a great start. But, I really wanted more of the book to be developed, even besides the fairy tales. I finished the book thinking that there were a lot of unanswered questions throughout the book, and I wanted more answers – about these specific characters, about society in general, about the future of society. Overall, this was a decent book with solid writing and interesting characters, but it could have used a stronger editor to push the author to show us even more and create a stronger overall story.
Thank you to Dundurn and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. It has not influenced my opinion.