Listen, as an afab person raised in a conservative Christian homeschooling community, I was AGGRESSIVELY the target audience for this book. But I think even if I weren’t, I’d be impressed with the heart and care and complexities present in this story. CJ really has done something spectacular here for those of us that are trying to navigate a world that feels so fundamentally different than the one we were sure existed, and that, I think, is something everyone has to do at one point in their life or another. Or maybe at every point. 

The characters were so quietly real and complex, each one grappling with their own questions and griefs. Even amidst the splashy, gory moments of violence, Sophie’s responses to the horror are the focus, how these moments inform who she is and who she is becoming. It does wonders to ground the book’s particularly bananas concept. 

This book feels like an anthropological exploration of the apocalypse, in the same way Becky Chambers writes anthropological explorations of space. The question of how society reforms, who helps, who harms, and who is caught in between is so loud, and feels so true to the world we currently inhabit. 

Plot is a little meandering but in a way that feels right for the genre. Apocalypse books aren’t a tight quest, they’re about survival. The emotional arc is ROCK SOLID in a way that allows for the ‘and then this happens’ parts of the plot to feel grounded. The prose is lovely, even if CJ is a bit of a fragment sentence girlie in a way I personally don’t love. I think her language is so simple yet perfectly evocative of what she wants to get across. 

I will be recommending this one pretty hard. 

*e-arc provided by netgalley