Scott Jackson

I thought the idea behind this story was interesting. A woman is left alone after surviving a (ridiculously) virulent and deadly plague. How does she cope and survive in her new environment? The problem I had is that the main character is so thoroughly un-likeable. The novel interspersed current time with backstory of her previous life, the issue with that was the backstory made her out to be whiney, entitled, and lacking in both empathy and gratitude. The current timeline is cursed with the classic survivor stupidity that causes many of these types of story to be irritating to read / watch. Nonsense decisions, basic errors of judgment, completely unnecessary choices had me sighing in frustration at what was going on, I get that she was in a state of trauma but I felt it went too far. I found myself simply not caring about her after a while and caring more about what happened to Lucky than her, I don’t feel that by the end she had really learned anything or particularly grown as a person given just how quickly she would fall back into old ways. I thought the narrator was excellent but the production was irritating, sometimes there would be sounds like rainfall or animal / bird sounds but these would be random and occasional which would be jarring instead of adding to the story. If you’re a fan of survival or survival horror I’d say there isn’t enough here to satisfy you, if you are a fan of ‘chick lit’ (whatever that is) where the main character is a contradictory self entitled whiner then you might get more out of it but the apocalyptic setting and graphic depictions of death and decay will probably put you off!