Not Alone

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Her job has taken her all around the UK, scrambling through woodland, paddling up rivers, squelching through… More about Sarah K. The story unfolds with a mix of flashbacks that provide a few revealing plot twists that kept me interested in how it was going to work out until the very end.

But there’s also a sense of adventure to it, as well as love throughout it and hope at the end of it. After a huge microplastic storm separated her and her lover and killed countless people, all she knows is how to survive--and resources are depleting. Katie lives in isolation, sheltered in her flat with her son Harry, who has only known life since the storm. The bond between Katie and Harry was beautiful to read, and you could really tell how much they loved each other, how Katie would do anything for Harry, and in turn how he also looked after her despite his very young age.Michaelides takes a literary turn in his latest novel, employing an unreliable narrator, the structure of classical drama, and a self-conscious eye to dismantling the locked-room mystery. At times, the unwritten parts were difficult to work through and I found myself just giving up and going along. They started to find plastic dust in rivers, soils and even the air – and also in the vast oceans, millions of pieces per square metre, washed there like it was a great big watery garbage dump. It was such a massive storm and so filled poisonous microfibers that it wiped out life as we know it.

And during the times that I wasn't reading it, my mind was still on Katie and Harry, hoping beyond hope that they were going to make it, that they were going to be okay. When Jack set-off for the hospital, knowing they’d need him when the storm hit, he had no idea that the storm would define the end of ‘Before’ and yield a post-apocalyptic after. If you’re asking why I bothered to finish let’s say I was holding out for a decent ending and I am utterly fucking disappointed. An exhilarating debut novel, tracing the harrowing journey of a mother and son fighting for survival and a future in a world ravaged by environmental disaster • “ Not Alone kept me breathless with tension… [A] gripping adventure story.I wanted her to succeed, to make it, the same way I want that for me, the same way I want that for my friends, and there aren’t a whole lot of books or media that have pulled that feeling out of me. Though she’s tried to protect herself from the poisonous dust outdoors, she’s beginning to feel her lungs burn when she exerts herself. We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

I mean, they barely have food, he doesn't know anything of the outside, he has spent his entire life in his apartment, not even meeting other people. I'm not sure how to rate this, because as I enjoyed the plot of the book, there was so many things I did not enjoy about this book.Jackson combines beautiful language, palm-sweating adventure, and a deep, true-to-life parent-child bond that transcends its post-apocalyptic setting, in a debut that emphasizes the importance of resilience, hope, and sustainability today. I possibly could have tolerated all this as a perfectly mediocre three star read if it hadn’t been so long, but the fact that it just dragged on and on and on, holy fuck. After years without human contact, Katie and Harry are shocked by the arrival of a threatening newcomer, just as Katie’s persistent cough seems to have taken a turn for the worse. Much of the novel is similarly overdetermined; a flashback to a precatastrophe self-defense class leads directly into a scene where Katie must put those skills to use.

Woman and son go on road trip across post apocalyptic landscape filled with nothingness, and are arguably too stupid to have survived the first fifty fucking miles, nevermind the remaining 300.

Then, after years without human contact, Katie and Harry are terrified by the unwelcome arrival of another survivor. Years after a mocroplastic mega storm killed much of the population, we meet Katie, surviving in an apartment with her son Harry, who has never known a world other than the current state it is in. We’re going to need that kind of hopeful grit if we’re to survive our own environmental catastrophe. There is very little hope in this story to make you want to keep going with the characters but the arc of the main character was interesting.