Disclaimer: I received an e-ARC from netgalley in exchange for a review.

A time-loop story centered around October 31st, 2020, when atom bombs explode in America. I don’t want to recap more of the plot as the summary already reveals quite a lot and so I just want to share my opinion on this piece:
As an action (& gore) heavy time-loop story it is great. It follows a bunch of people through this day as they attempt to survive. While covid is mentioned (face masks come up a few times in the beginning), this quickly fades into the background as current survival becomes more and more important. Brandon is the only one who remembers what happened after each time loop resets and as hinted at in the summary he goes quite far in his quest for survival. He wasn’t my favorite character (that spots reserved for Yolanda and Denise), but I was always excited when his story came up as I knew he would be the only one that would find a way to fix their problems. I also liked that he found a way to be incredibly resourceful in order to ensure their survival.
I also really enjoy the ending of the novel and while it felt a bit slow during the middle, the story picked up again towards the end and became quite interesting. I also enjoy messed up apocalypse stories, so I was fine with the intense amounts of violence portrayed here, but I wish we had been given a little bit more information on how and why the white supremacist Christian groups knew as much as they did and how they managed to mobilize that fast. I would not advise this book to anybody who does not want to read about (threats of and off-page instances of) sexual violence, (on-page) graphic deaths and lots and lots of violence targeting minorities.
However, I have two main issues with this story as well: The first is the massive amounts of transphobia and slurs reproduced on the page towards Yolanda. While I love that from the main characters everybody treats her well, her role in the story is very minimal and so having to read not only about how she’s harassed at the pharmacy, but also her childhood trauma including the t-slur, was a bit much. If she had played a more important role in the story herself, I might have understood this as a character-building moment, but the way it was done instead just felt rather exploitative. However, I appreciate that the author reached out to me after my review where I addressed a lingustic issue that is often used to other trans women (by writing trans woman as one single word, which does imply they are not just a different type of women, but a different thing alltogether) and that this will be fixed in the released version. The second issue I had was that I didn’t think the chapter following the conversative Christian biker gang, who are using the chaos to purify the world, was necessary. I think it gave too much away that could have been shared through the other characters discovering it themselves and made me a lot less interested in the story. A personal annoyance moment was also mentioning Harry Potter in a story that features trans people in 2024. Not A Vibe tbh.
All in all, it is still an interesting story with a fascinating premise and intriguing characters, particularly interesting for its great diversity of characters (including a black trans woman, a black family and a child with Down Syndrome, although I would have liked her to have a bit more of a plot in the story). Since those are characters often forgotten in other apocalyptical stories, I liked that they were portrayed here. If you are looking for a new and interesting take on time loops and apocalypse stories and have a strong stomach, you might enjoy this story!

Trigger warnings include: car accident, cheating, coercion to stay pregnant, deadnaming, death, domestic abuse, injury, gore, gun violence, mention of harry potter, homophobia, homophobic slurs, misgendering, racism (mainly anti-black and anti-asian racism, but also instances of slurs against other minority groups), racist language & racist slurs, sexual violence, suicide, transmisogny, transphobic slurs, violence