If there is a better motivation for getting your food storage in order than this book, I don't know it.Reading this book makes me grateful for the electricity that enables me to write this post. I am warm and have food in my cupboards and a way to communicate with the outside world.
Taking place in a world thrown into upheaval after a natural catastrophic event, it follows a teenage girl and her family and their struggles to survive. It's harrowing but compelling. If you had no electricity and no way to get food other than what you already had, how would you get through it?
The pacing was perfect. Beginning in a normal world full of schoolwork and petty high school problems, and then descending slowly into a pared-down closed-off survival world where priorities have been entirely changed, people are starving and dying, and yet the transition from the first to the final is as steady as if you were experiencing it yourself.
Given that the book is written as a series of journal entries, you are as close to the events and people as you can get without actually living through it. It is written in an entirely believable, realistic way. (Except perhaps for the ending, but that's not surprising coming from me, considering I loved "The Road.")
I'm excited to read the companion book, "The Dead and the Gone." But first I think I'm going to head upstairs and do some extra laundry...
* Also, I'm wondering how well this novel fits in with the dystopian genre. It's more atopian than dystopian, since there is no oppressive governing force, no government at all. But I'm likely to read more than the necessary 20 books for the challenge anyway, so I'm counting it regardless.
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