Not Alone

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Their safe place now feeling unsafe and after a revelation showing Katie’s fiancé may still be alive, Katie takes Harry on a previously unthinkable journey to find the man she was supposed to marry and a new life for her son. She doesn’t let Harry leave the flat at all, and their life five years after the storm is filled with daily suffering. Or that she would not teach her child anything about how to survive in the new world apart from mask wearing and hand washing.

He provided instructions on where he’s headed and how to start the car he’s thoughtfully left in the parking garage. and the atmospheric descriptions of a world wiped out by a microplastic storm place you right in the thick of this dark and terrifying post-apocalyptic setting. Far too late in the narrative we’re told, “They started to find plastic dust in rivers, soils and even the air—and also in the vast oceans, millions of pieces per square metre, all washed there like it was a great big watery garbage dump. In the present, Katie worries about plastic dust particles, toxic rainstorms, and encountering other people who might have survived.Katie narrates the story of her life after the cataclysmic event—a massive North Atlantic hurricane whipping up the tiny aerosolized plastics, landing on the shores of merry old England, and leaving mostly dead bodies in its wake.

Much of the novel is similarly overdetermined; a flashback to a precatastrophe self-defense class leads directly into a scene where Katie must put those skills to use. The author clearly meant for her to be a self-sufficient, strong woman who can take care of herself, but the reader is left with totally the opposite impression.Many of the survivors she meets along the way are menacing, and she struggles to trust even those who deserve it, like Andy and Sue, an older couple who have taken up together after losing their families in the storm. Katie keeps them alive by foraging for food, adhering to strict decontamination procedures, and avoiding contact with the outside world as much as possible.

As someone with clinical depression, many scenes and themes hit so close to home that I had to stop listening and switch to music. I'm not sure how to rate this, because as I enjoyed the plot of the book, there was so many things I did not enjoy about this book. When Jack set-off for the hospital, knowing they’d need him when the storm hit, he had no idea that the storm would define the end of ‘Before’ and yield a post-apocalyptic after.How an ecological disaster might look, how much we take for granted, and how continuing to damage the world we live in could lead to an unthinkable future. An outstandingly credible and gripping adventure story, rooted in a deep understanding of both ecology and family. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense.