I’m going to be honest with you: After the letdown of the previous book, The World We Live In, I did not have high hopes for the final book in The Last Survivors series. The thing I was most intrigued about was seeing how the world had gone on in the wake of this apocalypse that has shown no signs of improving throughout the last three books. 

We follow a new narrator, Miranda’s little brother Jon, and get to see the uber-segregated way he lives. He stresses about navigating the snooty opinions of his peers while most of his family lives in abject poverty. All the while, he’s also a star athlete (but it’s soccer and not baseball which means he’s growing up?). 

This book was simultaneously overwhelming and underwhelming with the amount of story elements that were going on. I did not find myself rooting for Jon at any point and the despair was oppressive. While I found a lot of validation in reading Life As We Knew It during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I cannot say I recommend or even enjoyed the books that followed it and this book was the nail in the coffin.