Reviews with content warning for Animal cruelty - Last One at the Party

The premise of this book seemed right up my alley. I love a good dystopian/survival story. However, I just could not get into this book and DNFd at 65%. I struggled with 3 main components. The first is the main character who is incredibly unlikable. She has no survival skills, treats animal pretty poorly, and is all around unrelatable even with her struggles with anxiety and depression. Since everyone is presumably dead, she is the only point of view you get and the only character you really spend time with aside from her best friend and her husband who are also both meh. Secondly, there is really nothing to the plot. Its a mix of the main character driving, drinking, and thinking about her past life with a few big moments thrown in. At the beginning it is clear that the main character is not capable of surviving on her own and I figured we'd spend the book watching her learn the hard way. There are very few moments like that. Instead she keeps randomly finding food, water, and shelter with little trouble and most of the book is her staying in hotels and drinking or doing mundane life things.....just alone. Lastly, I struggled with the lack of research and logic. At one point she says she sees a car every hundred miles or so (England is not that many hundred miles long anyway?) and then she says she went from London to like NorthHampton which is only 62 miles away. She also talks about snow being up to her thighs and then the next day it has completely melted and the grass is green. It just doesn't make sense. There seemed to be no research done into how bodies decompose or how long electricity would last without people. All in all it was a very frustrating book.

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clacksee's review

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adventurous dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Last One at the Party presents the reader with a story that's essentially a hyperbole of our current reality. A pandemic sweeps the world unchecked by attempts to constrain it. But instead of leaving most people merely inconvenienced, 6DM kills everyone in its path. Almost everyone.

Spoiler

fewer than one in a million

survive it.

Our nameless heroine is pretty much the worst possible person to survive something like this. She's selfish, tedious, insipid. She wilfully condemns various helpless animals to death, acknowledging their desperation and then moving on. Not since Heathcliff and Catherine have I come across main characters I hated so intensely.

As we get to know her, we see she's been battling severe depression and crippling anxiety for years even before the pandemic. Add PTSD after the fact and, well, she doesn't cope well. But she definitely shows emotional growth over the course of the book – it just takes her a long, long, loooooong time to get there.

It reminded me a lot of Anne Corlett's The Space Between the Stars.

To be honest, I'm not certain whether I actually liked this book. For a solid 90% of it, I despised the main character. But I'll tell you what: I could not put it down. And I've got such a serious book hangover from it, that I haven't been able to get into another book since.

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