Review also posted to my blog.


content warnings: mentions of death, seizures, injury
representation: bisexual protagonist, chinese half-deaf main character, chinese main characters, bi/pan main character, trans main character

“Don’t worry about making your ancestors proud. You don’t need to be perfect, just on the off chance you’re the last of your kind. Life is whatever you want it to be With whoever you want to be with. Life is the people around you, the ones you love. You just need to be happy. That’s all that matters.”

This is exactly the sort of sci-fi I love, and I desperately need a movie made of it (yes, I know that the concept is similar to Children of Men, but I still need this specific book adapted!)

From what I’ve heard, Lauren James’ books always fall into the category of “soft sci-fi” and this is no different. Set years after a virus swept the world and left humans infertile, the book follows the two youngest people alive, Lowrie and Shen, as they live among a community of a few hundred elderly people in London. They spend their time exploring and being taught by their parents, until secrets about the world and their existence start to come out.

I absolutely fell in love with Lowrie as a protagonist, as well as everyone else who inhabited her world. The characters are so endlessly endearing and lovable that I would argue it’s impossible to not fall in love with them. Something that’s even more impressive though is that Lauren James made me fall in love with characters who are long dead.

At the start of the novel, Lowrie finds a purse with ID for a woman named Maya. She goes into the social media archives and starts going through what is probably Maya’s Facebook and Twitter, reading decades-worth of posts. You get to see Maya despairing at how hot everyone on a dating show is, fall in love with her husband, be terrified at the new infertile world, be outraged, be ecstatic, be scared. And I didn’t only fall in love with her, but also all the other people that inhabit her world, like her future husband and friends.

The worldbuilding is also amazingly done. Lowrie lives in the middle of London, more or less, and everything outside of the small pocket of the world she lives in is slowly crumbling. Not just the physical setting but also the new little society that has formed. The fact that in this new society there isn’t any crime just because of how few people there are, the way that news works, the town meetings they’ll have, the roles that everyone is expected to fill. The descriptions of the past and how we ended up where we did also never felt too info-dumpy, largely because it’s not dwelled on too much. A lot of information comes from Maya’s posts, which means that the worldbuilding feels extremely organic.

There’s a big twist towards the end of this book which worked really well for me. I didn’t see it coming, but in retrospect it was so well planted before being revealed that I now want to reread it so I can pick up on the little clues. This twist meant that the last third of the book is a bit more action-packed than the rest of the book, but I think it was built up in a way that meant it worked.

I just loved everything about this book. If you want a soft, quiet take on a post-apocalyptic world that has a great twist and solution to said apocalypse, I would definitely recommend giving this a read.