Not Alone

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I possibly could have tolerated all this as a perfectly mediocre three star read if it hadn’t been so long, but the fact that it just dragged on and on and on, holy fuck. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people. There is so little left for her and Henry, that she figures it is worth finding out the truth about Jack. Katie forages, hunts the surviving animal population, and provides for Harry, who was born after the Storm, and who has never left their little home.

In a world very close to our own, a mother and her young son desperately fend for themselves in the confinement of their one bedroom flat. 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. I wanted her to succeed, to make it, the same way I want that for me, the same way I want that for my friends, and there aren’t a whole lot of books or media that have pulled that feeling out of me. 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.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! Through Katie’s eyes, he’s nothing but a threat, but there are degrees of ambiguity to how threatening he really is. 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. The story really showed the importance of knowledge and how your own fears can really seep into the mind of your child. Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.

Harry, her young son, has never left their apartment (Outside is alien enough to warrant a capital O). 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. Would any mother, having found a caring couple to carry on living with, decide to make a life threatening journey to scotland in the faint hope that the man she loves is still alive and she can find him. Katie, one of those survivors, lives in isolation with her son Harry, who was born after the storm, in a flat outside London.But when Katie finds a note that suggests her lost fiancé, Jack, is still alive, the two set out on a dangerous journey north in hopes of finding him. I did skim the rest of the book just to see if things ended the way she wanted them too and I am just glad I didn't finish this one. It’s a good book, but maybe not the best choice if you are feeling depressed or have severe environmental/climate anxiety. 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.