Not Alone

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Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs. Five years later, a stranger by the name of Sim appears out of the rain trying to escape a pack of wild dogs. Not Alone is as much an examination of the mother-child bond as it is a warning of impending climate disaster. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

Characters wonder whether it's safe to leave their homes and lecture each other over wearing face masks. Even hearing of communities coming back together--we never see them; they're only suggested through predatory men. She doesn’t let Harry leave the flat at all, and their life five years after the storm is filled with daily suffering. At times, the unwritten parts were difficult to work through and I found myself just giving up and going along. The toxicity of plastic dust is probably something we should worry about, although perhaps for now, a bit less than Katie does.The infrastructure is collapsing, the signs are rotted, and of course Katie has to use an old map rather than GPS. When they encounter bodies in cars and in buildings where they scavenge, she tells Harry they’re sleeping.

Katie is a weak little woman who can't even bear to think about the past in any way and spends half the time mooning over her lost fiancee that she needs more than life itself, apparently.JACKSON is an ecologist specializing in botany and has a keen interest in human-wildlife coexistence, conservation, climate change, and microplastics pollution. I found it well written and I flew through it; even though relatively little happens except for the mundane rituals of Katie's and Harry's survival, there are real moments of heart-in-your-throat-action amid some of the more repetitive parts (this is mostly in the dust itself and the mask wearing, which gets repeated over and over). But when Katie becomes so desperate for food that she kills and roasts a rabbit right in front of him, she finally explains what death is. With pollution a major concern, this made the story feel more believable and made it more of an uneasy read.

Five years after a toxic micro-plastic storm all but wiped out humanity, Katie, and her young son, Harry, live in isolation. I did skim the rest of the book just to see if things ended the way she wanted them too and I am just glad I didn't finish this one. If you’re curious about the story just read a plot synopsis, cuz it’s not terrible, and possibly even sweet, it’s probably just not worth your time. The atmosphere of the novel, set mostly on this wild Greek island, echoes strongly the classical tragedies of Greece. Preaching on the challenges of mental illness doesn’t do much good if only the choir can relate or understand what is happening.

We learn a lot about who Katie is and her relationship to Jack and Harry before there is much momentum to the plot. This felt so very claustrophobic, and while I can’t say I had a ‘good’ time with this, I did find it a powerful read. As people who know what the outside world is like, who can name what things are as we come across them, who understand how to navigate outside, it was an experience to follow Harry, who had a massive lack of understanding of anything outside of the flat, leading to a lot of fear and intrigue.

I appreciate that at first it felt like a love story of a mother's sacrifice for her sons survival and the bond they share,, but I also felt like it was also as much as a story about Katie making this journey to save herself as well. So she goes off and drags her kid through all these dangers and hazards where she might die and leave him alone at any time.Katie forages while Harry, who was born after the storm and knows nothing of life Before, lives in relative fear of anything outside the confines of their small London flat. After having a few scares and finding an old note from Jack, she realizes he could still be alive and out there somewhere. That is not intended to make the narrator sound bad, because I actually thought the narrator was pretty good, but the combination of her voice and a whiny 5 year old boy made this an excruciatingly painful experience. Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U. It's been a while since I read a book and genuinely hated every single character in it, but this one accomplished that easily.