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Feb 07, 2018lostintheshelves rated this title 2.5 out of 5 stars
I love post-apocalyptic fiction and was really excited to find one such novel with a bisexual heroine, but was deeply disappointed by this very mediocre book. The writing is neither great nor terrible, and the apocalypse (clearly written by someone that doesn't understand viral evolution) a little too indebted to other stories. But I could handle that. The problem is that the best post-apocalyptic fiction gives you both a sense of the world breaking down, and the work it takes to build it up, but this author really only cared about the despair side of things. She gave very gory details of the breakdown, but seemed to get bored and skip things whenever rebuilding took place, making the ending nonsensical and the book depressing in ways that didn't feel earned. Also the underlying ideas, which are important in speculative fiction, felt half-baked. This is a feminist novel in which relationships between women are always negative (usually because other women are too stupid to appreciate the nameless heroine), and a ostensibly left-wing novel that promotes some very right-wing ideas about a heroic lone wolf with a gun. But I never felt the author was exploring the interesting contradictions in her ideas; instead, it just felt like she hadn't thought things through, like a cynical teenager. It's an absorbing enough to read on a plane, but I can't recommend it.