I received this book for free from O’Brien Press in exchange for an honest review.

Leon is an initiate in a world that’s been destroyed by solar flares, and its inhabitants are waiting for the fourth and final message from an alien civilisation promising to save them. To become a man, Leon now must go on a hunt in the wilderness but things unravel very quickly and Leon ends up on a completely different kind of journey.

There is very little to praise about this book. Literally the only thing I can say was promising about it was the writing itself. The author can write and that’s about it, the story itself was terrible and disturbing and it just really irritated me. I wanted to DNF this book after a few short chapters but decided to finish it all so I could make sure I had read the full book before giving a critical review.

The premise of this book is confusing, and just grows more baffling as readers are given more glimpses into the world and the different types of people and communities who live it. Nothing is really explained properly and I feel like I was kept in the dark about everything simply because Leon didn’t know anything. Even when characters like Martha/Ulya tried to explain things - it still didn’t make any sense.

This book is a dystopian with a hefty dose of sci-fi but it was also hard to figure out where in the world it was set. It seemed to be America but then Ulya came from the Ukraine and knew America was America, not what others called it and I couldn’t figure out why she knew some things and every other character didn’t. It was so confusing. Something happens to Leon early on in the book too and he begins to change or something begins to transform within him, and this also wasn’t really explained properly. It was like the reader was just expected to accept everything.

But the WORST thing in this book was the backwards way every single woman was treated. I mean there’s literally only about a handful of women who appear in the book, and only one of these has any sort of main role - but she’s a slave, and for some reason sticks to Leon the entire time despite being free to run and she does not any real excuse to actually like or care for him because he’s a bit of an empty character. No character really had a personality in this book. Every female character seemed to be there just to act as an accessory to a male character, and it was sooooo problematic. I’m shocked this book was seen as fit to publish. We are so BEYOND books like this now. There was also a problematic discussion among a few of the young male characters near the start about this crazy ‘bleeding between the legs’ they heard happened to a woman, where she didn’t even need to cut herself to bleed. So obviously talking about periods and in a modern world where there is still so much stigma around periods (think girls missing school, women being contained to huts during their periods in third world communities) this just IS NOT ON. In a YA book, there should not be this conspiracy, dramatised rumourville around menstruation. How great would it have been to have men who knew about periods, were not afraid or grossed out about them and got on with normal life - ya know, the way all women do. Shocking, I know.

Don’t read this book.