Book tackles mental health head on and it does a pretty good job portraying depression, suicidal ideation and PTSD. 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. She painted a very descriptive picture of the changing world and landscape but I think being American, some of it was so foreign that it didn’t always make sense.

Her job has taken her all around the UK, scrambling through woodland, paddling up rivers, squelching through… More about Sarah K. Years after a mocroplastic mega storm killed much of the population, we meet Katie, surviving in an apartment with her son Harry, who has never known a world other than the current state it is in. S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. And I understand the comparison I do, in as much as there is an adult and a child traveling together in a post-apocalyptic world, and I hate to hold the example written by a woman up as the shining example of the saltine cracker of fucking apocalypse stories, but here you go.

He provided instructions on where he’s headed and how to start the car he’s thoughtfully left in the parking garage. Bodies continue to build up around them, inescapable layers of toxic dust hang heavily in the air and Katie is only getting sicker. It was annoying to me that he had spent so much energy in trying to prepare her to come and find him rather than devising a plan to get back to her.

Then, after years without human contact, Katie and Harry are terrified by the unwelcome arrival of another survivor. But they are always hungry, and they are always afraid, and Katie can no longer ignore the sharp pain in her lungs. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. After having a few scares and finding an old note from Jack, she realizes he could still be alive and out there somewhere. Jackson combines beautiful language, palm-sweating adventure, and a deep, true-to-life parent-child bond that transcends its postapocalyptic setting, in a debut that emphasizes the importance of relationships, trust, and sustainability today. The story unfolds with a mix of flashbacks that provide a few revealing plot twists that kept me interested in how it was going to work out until the very end. And Katie was an overachiever, really trying to do her best to make a difference for the environment and climate.

It's a beautiful book about a brutal reality, with a heartbreakingly vulnerable, authentic mother-child relationship at its heart. The bodies begin to build up around them and layers of poisonous dust hang heavily in the air, seeping into the soil and slowly killing anything attempting to cling onto the natural world. But there’s also a sense of adventure to it, as well as love throughout it and hope at the end of it. But then I really had to stop and think what would I expect from a young child living through an apocalypse?There's a tendency for these types of books to get a little heavy handed in their message, but with the exception of Katie lamenting a few times "If we all only went vegan! oh, and for good measure, the author just had to include sexual assault in a way that felt like it was just to give Katie a little angst or something, but never explained how the attacker didn't do more or kill her or anything? Confined to their small flat, and only facing the hazards of the outside world to hunt and to forage for food.

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.Wanting to soften his understanding, Katie assures him, “You get to live every day, you only die once. Harry, who has some limited world experience, thinks just about any living thing larger than an insect is a “nasty. If the MC had trained him not to be afraid of the dark, if he had learned to live with hunger and thirst and put his mask and boots on at all times, and be afraid of the dirt and the water instead of these imaginary fucking “nasties”. It is also a powerful portrayal of a mother’s devotion to her son, that maternal instinct to protect him at all costs.