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by_lrevans's review
5.0
This review may contain some spoilers, but not enough to ruin major plot points. I received an ARC of THE OLD LOVE AND THE NEW in exchange for my honest review, but it did not affect this review at all. Enjoy~! ♥
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Alistair Caradec is a demon who learned how to type. That’s the only way I can explain how he writes characters who are so thoroughly tormented inside and out. And I do mean inside AND out. I received an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of THE OLD LOVE AND THE NEW, a gay dystopian set in London, England, and I genuinely loved reading this story. I say this even while also admitting it was like living in one of my depressive episodes. Being in Sid’s mind was both draining and validating. I felt myself reaching for my own unhealthy coping mechanisms, fighting the urge to put down the book and go to sleep to relieve both myself and Sid from our torment. While it was a struggle at times to keep turning the pages, it was also a lesson to keep going. People need you. YOU need you. The only way out is through. I felt understood as I read Sid’s story and, for that, I applaud Alistair on his creation of such a relatable character.
In this world, the government rounded up all the cis gender women in London and Ireland twenty-five years ago. There hasn’t been a cis gender woman in London or Ireland since. People lost their mothers, their daughters, their sisters, their wives, their aunts, their grandmothers. What prompted the government to load them all up into buses and ship them to quarantine facilities? A highly contagious, lethal disease that only women could catch. But it’s strange, because in the beginning of the story, Sid seems to be frightened that he or Jamie could catch this illness… A plot hole or Sid’s psychosis?
Well, in any case, that’s the setup for the plot and setting. I want to talk a bit about Sid and Jamie (the two main characters). Sid and Jamie are flatmates who have known each other since college. Sid was two years old and Jamie was four when the quarantine happened, so while Sid has no recollection of his mother, Jamie does have a few memories of his mom. Sid’s mother was Pakistani and we see how others have targeted Sid all his life, from elementary school to present, based on his ethnicity.
Remember how I said Alistair Caradec was a demon who learned how to type? Well, instead of just giving poor ol’ Sid racism to deal with, he also decided that Sid would develop psychosis at the age of nineteen. Now Sid hears a voice all the time that tells him to hurt himself, tells him people hate him, tells him that everyone’s out to get him. Even when he obeys the voice, it turns on him and won’t be satisfied.
That’s enough internal conflict, right? Well, you’d think that, being human and all. But the demonic prowess that is Alistair isn’t letting Sid off that easy. Sid feels like a pervert for fantasizing about Jamie Hayes, his flatmate and best friend since college. He’s afraid he’ll ruin their friendship, so he’s just been pining after Jamie for ten years like, “This is fine. I’m fine. I’ll just suffer forever.” This is the core of the problem, but Sid is too distracted by his ambivalent sexuality to address the real issue. By not admitting to himself that he’s actually gay, he doesn’t have to look deeper into his attachment to Jamie.
See, the thing about a woman-less world is that people still have needs. So everyone had to adapt to having sex with each other to fulfill these needs or they went without. Even pornographic material depicting women has been outlawed. Books depicting women or written by women were also outlawed. So were movies and music. There are no (legal) traces of anything feminine in this world at all. Not everyone who’s engaging in sexual interactions with men are actually gay. They’re just trying to fill a need they still have with what’s available.
So this means that there’s a lot of confusion about sexuality in this world. Men are having sex with men, but they have to ask themselves, “Am I doing this because I’m gay or because I have no other choice? If women existed here, would I be attracted to them?” Some of the older generation who were straight and in their twenties (or older) at the time of the quarantine are even worse off, because they know who they are. They know they aren’t gay. They’ve been with women and enjoyed it. They’re confident in their sexuality as straight men. Now they live in a world denying them access to what they know they need, wishing for what they can’t have. It definitely takes a toll on everyone’s mental health.
But for Sid and Jamie, this is all they’ve ever known. They don’t have a basis for comparison. Since Sid only has sex with men out of need, he sees sex as a perverted, dirty necessity. It’s something he does without forming emotional attachments to those he hooks up with. Because of this, he feels deep shame for his sexual attraction to Jamie. It’s like he thinks that fantasizing about his friend and flatmate equates to reducing him to shameful, pornographic material. Sid spends most of this novel lying to himself about his deep love for Jamie, but if he would only admit his feelings to himself, then most of his shame would probably evaporate.
We don’t know much about Jamie’s internal thought processes. He plays his cards pretty close to his chest for the entire novel. But I will say that I have a love-hate relationship with him and that he’s a very serious, calculating man. He cares about Sid, but a lot of the time his mission to topple the government takes priority over Sid. And I have a hard time forgiving that, considering that Sid’s top priority is always Jamie from the beginning until the end.
Chapter one opens with Sid and Jamie sitting at a bar, waiting on a friend to join them. Jamie’s pretty tipsy already and Alistair does a fantastic job of showing readers their closeness right off rip. He accomplishes this by showing us that Sid can tell how much Jamie’s drank just by noticing subtle changes in his personality and body language. Alistair also gives us a great glimpse into Sid’s psychosis from the start of chapter one through demonstration.
(The telly on the wall’s trying to give everyone a seizure. I hear static and what sounds like the distant voices of the presenters, only that’s not possible cos the mute symbol’s blinking on the top right corner of the flat screen.)
Jamie’s been bitching this whole time about not being able to get published because his writing is “too serious” and all publishers want are fluffy escapism pieces. Jamie pays a lot of attention to Sid and monitors him, even while shit-faced. For example, when Sid begins singing “It’s Raining Men”, a song he sings to comfort himself, Jamie shushes him. This might seem dismissive, but later in the story we learn that Sid doesn’t like a lot of attention being drawn to his illness. He doesn’t disclose it to everyone, because he doesn’t want people thinking he’s dangerous or looking at him weird. So Jamie discreetly shushing him lets Sid know, “Hey, you’re doing that out loud,” and also helps to break him out of it. However, Jamie is still drunk and doesn’t have the best judgment in his current state, so he’s not filtering himself very well. He lets stress and anger seep into his tone when he’s ranting about the injustice of the publishing world and society in general. The stress triggers Sid, who tries to hide his tic from Jamie by pretending to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear. But again, drunk Jamie still catches it and gives him a worried look. I wanted to mention all this to show you how close these two men are, how CONNECTED. It also paints a pretty clear picture of how their relationship with one another works.
Now, I have a terrible habit of reading the opening pages of any story with lightning-fast speed, committing only the most prominent information to memory. As a result, I didn’t realize that when the barman (Reg) played an Irish folk song that it was dangerous because the singer was female. Then again, we aren’t told that women are outlawed by this point anyway. We get hints of it, but it isn’t said outright. Hence, I didn’t catch it.
When this song comes on, the whole tavern goes quiet. Men lift their glasses in memoriam of the women they lost and Jamie prepares to do the same. But Sid stops him, recognizing the danger and growing intensely fearful. “It’s Raining Men” is playing at full-blast in Sid’s head and, thankfully, Jamie abandons his would-be gesture of solidarity. The police show up and shut down the bar, taking Reg with them, and Reg looks around at his bar with sad eyes, as if seeing it for the last time. There’s been this old guy in the corner the whole time just reading a newspaper. He doesn’t even look up when the police come in and haul Reg out, so it looks like he’s the informant.
Outside the bar, Sid lights up a smoke as Jamie watches him with disapproval. This is also a good demonstration of what it’s like to live with mental illness, as most of us (myself included) smoke cigarettes for the dopamine benefits. People with depression, bipolar disorder, and other mental illnesses are statistically more likely to rely on substances (namely, nicotine) for their happy-chemical fixes.
As they stride down the street, we get a description of the crumbling buildings held together with flimsy scaffolding. A church collapsed last year and killed twenty-five people, so I’m guessing cutting London and Ireland off from the rest of the world had a negative effect on the economy. I appreciate how Alistair manages to convey all this information through showing instead of just telling us about the financial woes of the city.
The night of the first chapter is “address night”, which means this is the one night a month where an old speech from twenty-five years ago is replayed for everyone to hear. It’s propaganda, a reminder that the conditions the citizens live in right now is due to what “had to be done” back then. We learn through Sid, who works as a delivery man, the wide range of the citizens’ interpretations of the address. Some people see it as a religion, others watch it like they’d watch sports. But the older generation, the ones old enough to understand what was happening when it happened, they mourn their lost loved ones during address night. I love that the author could transform something that could have been dry and political into something to which I could emotionally connect.
Sid and Jamie continue down the street and happen upon a fender-bender. The cops show up and Sid is certain they’ll stop them, despite Jamie’s assurances. The police do stop them. They ask for their passports, being racist sacks of shit toward Sid, but they let them go on their way. I love that Alistair even managed to show readers the racism Sid faces in the very first chapter!
Jamie stops for chips on their way home and Alistair shows us that Jamie’s the Greek God of Hawt when Jamie convinces the shopkeep to serve them with nothing but a smile, despite the fact they were getting ready to close. More showing instead of telling!
Then, we get the Inciting Incident™.
A boy nabs Jamie’s chips when they come out of the store, running down the street. Jamie chases after the boy, Sid following on his heels for lack of options. When they corner the boy in an alley, they discover the boy is actually a girl. A woman. Sid goes into a sort of apathetic panic, not really outwardly reacting to the situation, but terrified on the inside.
When Sid’s phone rings, it’s Tom—the guy they were supposed to meet at Reg’s bar—and Sid agrees to meet him at another bar. It’s pretty obvious Jamie’s excited about finding a healthy woman, but he’s also freaking out in his own way. He’s surprised that Sid’s going with Tom after this, but this is how Sid copes with the shock. He wants to shut it off, ignore the problem, and I can SOOOOO relate.
When I first read this inciting incident, I felt that it was understated. I wasn’t as versed in psychosis as Alistair when I read this the first time. But after reading this entire book and spending so much time with Sid, I feel intimately familiar with schizoaffective disorder. Some of Sid’s reactions and paranoia surrounding the events of this story are so relatable, I found myself weighing the differences between anxiety/depression (my issues) and psychosis (Sid's issue). Where does one end and the other begin? If there’s one thing that makes me love a book, it’s whether or not it gets me thinking. And THE OLD LOVE AND THE NEW definitely got my gears whirring!
I could tell you everything about this book, chapter by chapter, but I’ll leave it with my review of the first chapter for now. I might type up my As-I-Go Notebook Review and share it on my site later (LREVANS.SITE), but I think my thoughts about every event of the first chapter is more than enough to set the tone for this entire story. Alistair did a bang-up job of establishing setting, character relationships, character personalities, worldbuilding, and kickstarting the plot in just this one chapter. He’s incredibly talented and I was stunned with his work as I read this story.
But he’s a demon. The way this book ends was fucking gut-wrenching and I adore it. I love that he hurt us and himself to give us such a raw, honest ending. At first I hated him for it, but after I processed and took a moment to breathe, I understood the bigger picture and the lesson this ending teaches. The lesson of this story is, “Even if you get what you want, there’s still going to be pain.” That’s valuable. Too many stories end with sunshine and rainbows, giving you that warm, fuzzy feeling in the pit of your stomach. That’s how life is supposed to be, right? That’s what we want it to be. We want to know that at the end of our struggle, we’ll find peace and happiness. “Everything will be okay.” But it won’t. In life, everything is never going to be okay. Not for long anyway. Even if we solve a really big problem in our lives, there’s still going to be other problems we’ll have to deal with.
For example, let’s say the goal of your “story” is to get your car fixed so you can drive it. You accomplish that. Now is everything in your life perfect? Of course not. You get a dopamine rush because this was the issue causing you the most stress, but you still have auxiliary problems like money, family, friends, etcetera.
When we get to the end of this book, everything is not okay. The characters didn’t get everything that they wanted, but they did get some of it. And that is the most honest kind of storytelling I’ve read in a long time. Preorder your copy of THE OLD LOVE AND THE NEW here: https://books2read.com/TheOldLoveAndTheNew
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Alistair Caradec is a demon who learned how to type. That’s the only way I can explain how he writes characters who are so thoroughly tormented inside and out. And I do mean inside AND out. I received an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of THE OLD LOVE AND THE NEW, a gay dystopian set in London, England, and I genuinely loved reading this story. I say this even while also admitting it was like living in one of my depressive episodes. Being in Sid’s mind was both draining and validating. I felt myself reaching for my own unhealthy coping mechanisms, fighting the urge to put down the book and go to sleep to relieve both myself and Sid from our torment. While it was a struggle at times to keep turning the pages, it was also a lesson to keep going. People need you. YOU need you. The only way out is through. I felt understood as I read Sid’s story and, for that, I applaud Alistair on his creation of such a relatable character.
In this world, the government rounded up all the cis gender women in London and Ireland twenty-five years ago. There hasn’t been a cis gender woman in London or Ireland since. People lost their mothers, their daughters, their sisters, their wives, their aunts, their grandmothers. What prompted the government to load them all up into buses and ship them to quarantine facilities? A highly contagious, lethal disease that only women could catch. But it’s strange, because in the beginning of the story, Sid seems to be frightened that he or Jamie could catch this illness… A plot hole or Sid’s psychosis?
Well, in any case, that’s the setup for the plot and setting. I want to talk a bit about Sid and Jamie (the two main characters). Sid and Jamie are flatmates who have known each other since college. Sid was two years old and Jamie was four when the quarantine happened, so while Sid has no recollection of his mother, Jamie does have a few memories of his mom. Sid’s mother was Pakistani and we see how others have targeted Sid all his life, from elementary school to present, based on his ethnicity.
Remember how I said Alistair Caradec was a demon who learned how to type? Well, instead of just giving poor ol’ Sid racism to deal with, he also decided that Sid would develop psychosis at the age of nineteen. Now Sid hears a voice all the time that tells him to hurt himself, tells him people hate him, tells him that everyone’s out to get him. Even when he obeys the voice, it turns on him and won’t be satisfied.
That’s enough internal conflict, right? Well, you’d think that, being human and all. But the demonic prowess that is Alistair isn’t letting Sid off that easy. Sid feels like a pervert for fantasizing about Jamie Hayes, his flatmate and best friend since college. He’s afraid he’ll ruin their friendship, so he’s just been pining after Jamie for ten years like, “This is fine. I’m fine. I’ll just suffer forever.” This is the core of the problem, but Sid is too distracted by his ambivalent sexuality to address the real issue. By not admitting to himself that he’s actually gay, he doesn’t have to look deeper into his attachment to Jamie.
See, the thing about a woman-less world is that people still have needs. So everyone had to adapt to having sex with each other to fulfill these needs or they went without. Even pornographic material depicting women has been outlawed. Books depicting women or written by women were also outlawed. So were movies and music. There are no (legal) traces of anything feminine in this world at all. Not everyone who’s engaging in sexual interactions with men are actually gay. They’re just trying to fill a need they still have with what’s available.
So this means that there’s a lot of confusion about sexuality in this world. Men are having sex with men, but they have to ask themselves, “Am I doing this because I’m gay or because I have no other choice? If women existed here, would I be attracted to them?” Some of the older generation who were straight and in their twenties (or older) at the time of the quarantine are even worse off, because they know who they are. They know they aren’t gay. They’ve been with women and enjoyed it. They’re confident in their sexuality as straight men. Now they live in a world denying them access to what they know they need, wishing for what they can’t have. It definitely takes a toll on everyone’s mental health.
But for Sid and Jamie, this is all they’ve ever known. They don’t have a basis for comparison. Since Sid only has sex with men out of need, he sees sex as a perverted, dirty necessity. It’s something he does without forming emotional attachments to those he hooks up with. Because of this, he feels deep shame for his sexual attraction to Jamie. It’s like he thinks that fantasizing about his friend and flatmate equates to reducing him to shameful, pornographic material. Sid spends most of this novel lying to himself about his deep love for Jamie, but if he would only admit his feelings to himself, then most of his shame would probably evaporate.
We don’t know much about Jamie’s internal thought processes. He plays his cards pretty close to his chest for the entire novel. But I will say that I have a love-hate relationship with him and that he’s a very serious, calculating man. He cares about Sid, but a lot of the time his mission to topple the government takes priority over Sid. And I have a hard time forgiving that, considering that Sid’s top priority is always Jamie from the beginning until the end.
Chapter one opens with Sid and Jamie sitting at a bar, waiting on a friend to join them. Jamie’s pretty tipsy already and Alistair does a fantastic job of showing readers their closeness right off rip. He accomplishes this by showing us that Sid can tell how much Jamie’s drank just by noticing subtle changes in his personality and body language. Alistair also gives us a great glimpse into Sid’s psychosis from the start of chapter one through demonstration.
(The telly on the wall’s trying to give everyone a seizure. I hear static and what sounds like the distant voices of the presenters, only that’s not possible cos the mute symbol’s blinking on the top right corner of the flat screen.)
Jamie’s been bitching this whole time about not being able to get published because his writing is “too serious” and all publishers want are fluffy escapism pieces. Jamie pays a lot of attention to Sid and monitors him, even while shit-faced. For example, when Sid begins singing “It’s Raining Men”, a song he sings to comfort himself, Jamie shushes him. This might seem dismissive, but later in the story we learn that Sid doesn’t like a lot of attention being drawn to his illness. He doesn’t disclose it to everyone, because he doesn’t want people thinking he’s dangerous or looking at him weird. So Jamie discreetly shushing him lets Sid know, “Hey, you’re doing that out loud,” and also helps to break him out of it. However, Jamie is still drunk and doesn’t have the best judgment in his current state, so he’s not filtering himself very well. He lets stress and anger seep into his tone when he’s ranting about the injustice of the publishing world and society in general. The stress triggers Sid, who tries to hide his tic from Jamie by pretending to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear. But again, drunk Jamie still catches it and gives him a worried look. I wanted to mention all this to show you how close these two men are, how CONNECTED. It also paints a pretty clear picture of how their relationship with one another works.
Now, I have a terrible habit of reading the opening pages of any story with lightning-fast speed, committing only the most prominent information to memory. As a result, I didn’t realize that when the barman (Reg) played an Irish folk song that it was dangerous because the singer was female. Then again, we aren’t told that women are outlawed by this point anyway. We get hints of it, but it isn’t said outright. Hence, I didn’t catch it.
When this song comes on, the whole tavern goes quiet. Men lift their glasses in memoriam of the women they lost and Jamie prepares to do the same. But Sid stops him, recognizing the danger and growing intensely fearful. “It’s Raining Men” is playing at full-blast in Sid’s head and, thankfully, Jamie abandons his would-be gesture of solidarity. The police show up and shut down the bar, taking Reg with them, and Reg looks around at his bar with sad eyes, as if seeing it for the last time. There’s been this old guy in the corner the whole time just reading a newspaper. He doesn’t even look up when the police come in and haul Reg out, so it looks like he’s the informant.
Outside the bar, Sid lights up a smoke as Jamie watches him with disapproval. This is also a good demonstration of what it’s like to live with mental illness, as most of us (myself included) smoke cigarettes for the dopamine benefits. People with depression, bipolar disorder, and other mental illnesses are statistically more likely to rely on substances (namely, nicotine) for their happy-chemical fixes.
As they stride down the street, we get a description of the crumbling buildings held together with flimsy scaffolding. A church collapsed last year and killed twenty-five people, so I’m guessing cutting London and Ireland off from the rest of the world had a negative effect on the economy. I appreciate how Alistair manages to convey all this information through showing instead of just telling us about the financial woes of the city.
The night of the first chapter is “address night”, which means this is the one night a month where an old speech from twenty-five years ago is replayed for everyone to hear. It’s propaganda, a reminder that the conditions the citizens live in right now is due to what “had to be done” back then. We learn through Sid, who works as a delivery man, the wide range of the citizens’ interpretations of the address. Some people see it as a religion, others watch it like they’d watch sports. But the older generation, the ones old enough to understand what was happening when it happened, they mourn their lost loved ones during address night. I love that the author could transform something that could have been dry and political into something to which I could emotionally connect.
Sid and Jamie continue down the street and happen upon a fender-bender. The cops show up and Sid is certain they’ll stop them, despite Jamie’s assurances. The police do stop them. They ask for their passports, being racist sacks of shit toward Sid, but they let them go on their way. I love that Alistair even managed to show readers the racism Sid faces in the very first chapter!
Jamie stops for chips on their way home and Alistair shows us that Jamie’s the Greek God of Hawt when Jamie convinces the shopkeep to serve them with nothing but a smile, despite the fact they were getting ready to close. More showing instead of telling!
Then, we get the Inciting Incident™.
A boy nabs Jamie’s chips when they come out of the store, running down the street. Jamie chases after the boy, Sid following on his heels for lack of options. When they corner the boy in an alley, they discover the boy is actually a girl. A woman. Sid goes into a sort of apathetic panic, not really outwardly reacting to the situation, but terrified on the inside.
When Sid’s phone rings, it’s Tom—the guy they were supposed to meet at Reg’s bar—and Sid agrees to meet him at another bar. It’s pretty obvious Jamie’s excited about finding a healthy woman, but he’s also freaking out in his own way. He’s surprised that Sid’s going with Tom after this, but this is how Sid copes with the shock. He wants to shut it off, ignore the problem, and I can SOOOOO relate.
When I first read this inciting incident, I felt that it was understated. I wasn’t as versed in psychosis as Alistair when I read this the first time. But after reading this entire book and spending so much time with Sid, I feel intimately familiar with schizoaffective disorder. Some of Sid’s reactions and paranoia surrounding the events of this story are so relatable, I found myself weighing the differences between anxiety/depression (my issues) and psychosis (Sid's issue). Where does one end and the other begin? If there’s one thing that makes me love a book, it’s whether or not it gets me thinking. And THE OLD LOVE AND THE NEW definitely got my gears whirring!
I could tell you everything about this book, chapter by chapter, but I’ll leave it with my review of the first chapter for now. I might type up my As-I-Go Notebook Review and share it on my site later (LREVANS.SITE), but I think my thoughts about every event of the first chapter is more than enough to set the tone for this entire story. Alistair did a bang-up job of establishing setting, character relationships, character personalities, worldbuilding, and kickstarting the plot in just this one chapter. He’s incredibly talented and I was stunned with his work as I read this story.
But he’s a demon. The way this book ends was fucking gut-wrenching and I adore it. I love that he hurt us and himself to give us such a raw, honest ending. At first I hated him for it, but after I processed and took a moment to breathe, I understood the bigger picture and the lesson this ending teaches. The lesson of this story is, “Even if you get what you want, there’s still going to be pain.” That’s valuable. Too many stories end with sunshine and rainbows, giving you that warm, fuzzy feeling in the pit of your stomach. That’s how life is supposed to be, right? That’s what we want it to be. We want to know that at the end of our struggle, we’ll find peace and happiness. “Everything will be okay.” But it won’t. In life, everything is never going to be okay. Not for long anyway. Even if we solve a really big problem in our lives, there’s still going to be other problems we’ll have to deal with.
For example, let’s say the goal of your “story” is to get your car fixed so you can drive it. You accomplish that. Now is everything in your life perfect? Of course not. You get a dopamine rush because this was the issue causing you the most stress, but you still have auxiliary problems like money, family, friends, etcetera.
When we get to the end of this book, everything is not okay. The characters didn’t get everything that they wanted, but they did get some of it. And that is the most honest kind of storytelling I’ve read in a long time. Preorder your copy of THE OLD LOVE AND THE NEW here: https://books2read.com/TheOldLoveAndTheNew
wildfaeriecaps's review
5.0
Holy. Wow.
I just.
This is going to be one those books that sticks with you your whole life. I know it.
I knew going in that this was going to be an emotional ride, but nothing could have possibly prepared me for the gut-punch that it was. At times it was incomprehensible, and others it was so achingly relatable that it was beyond uncanny. This is some of the very best writing and storytelling I've ever read. Give this one a go, friends, but make sure you've got someone on standby with ample hugs when you need them.
I just.
This is going to be one those books that sticks with you your whole life. I know it.
I knew going in that this was going to be an emotional ride, but nothing could have possibly prepared me for the gut-punch that it was. At times it was incomprehensible, and others it was so achingly relatable that it was beyond uncanny. This is some of the very best writing and storytelling I've ever read. Give this one a go, friends, but make sure you've got someone on standby with ample hugs when you need them.
gryerson's review
3.0
I had the pleasure of reading an ARC of The Old Love and the New, and am very grateful for the opportunity. This isn't necessarily the sort of book I would find myself drawn to but I found the premise intriguing enough to check it out.
This felt like a very personal piece of writing; one that rang of truth on the part of the author, which leant the story some gravity. Set against the backdrop of a mysterious illness, it would be easy to label the story as dystopian, but it's much more than that. This is ultimately a story about people and their relationships. The book featured a range of characters, with representation of neurodiversity and across the LGBTQ+ spectrum.
Ultimately the book didn't land for me - I wanted to know far more about the dystopian story in the background, and I didn't find the characters particularly relatable. I also found the writing at times to be difficult to follow, but understand that it was a reflection of the narrator and thus appreciated the artistic choice.
Overall the book is well written, and there are many people who would likely find themselves represented within the pages. For that reason, if for nothing else, I recommend checking it out.
This felt like a very personal piece of writing; one that rang of truth on the part of the author, which leant the story some gravity. Set against the backdrop of a mysterious illness, it would be easy to label the story as dystopian, but it's much more than that. This is ultimately a story about people and their relationships. The book featured a range of characters, with representation of neurodiversity and across the LGBTQ+ spectrum.
Ultimately the book didn't land for me - I wanted to know far more about the dystopian story in the background, and I didn't find the characters particularly relatable. I also found the writing at times to be difficult to follow, but understand that it was a reflection of the narrator and thus appreciated the artistic choice.
Overall the book is well written, and there are many people who would likely find themselves represented within the pages. For that reason, if for nothing else, I recommend checking it out.
perfektionaise's review
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
spacecase21's review
adventurous
challenging
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
ladylaurenexplorer's review
I’m just not in the mood to read this right now. Will pick it back up later!
amphipodgirl's review
challenging
dark
emotional
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
This is one of those ones that's hard to rate, because it's a very well-executed example of the thing that it is, but the thing that it is isn't the right book for me in the moment. I probably shouldn't have read a post-apocalyptic novel that has echoes of the Holocaust and a narrator with schizoaffective disorder on the same day that I adjusted my steroid dose and had only limited Internet access. It would have been a better day for a romcom. I could decline to rate, but I think the book and author deserve a boost.
That said, this is very well executed. I don't know a lot about schizoaffective disorder, but the treatment of it was respectful and affecting. We follow Sid through ups and downs with his mental health, and we see him and a few others encounter the truth of what happened in the government quarantine centers and decide what to do about that knowledge in the face of a brutal police state. It's about gender and friendship and love and oppression and how and when and whether to fight. The elements are compelling and well-balanced and I recommend it -- but maybe not on a day when you're already emotionally on edge.
That said, this is very well executed. I don't know a lot about schizoaffective disorder, but the treatment of it was respectful and affecting. We follow Sid through ups and downs with his mental health, and we see him and a few others encounter the truth of what happened in the government quarantine centers and decide what to do about that knowledge in the face of a brutal police state. It's about gender and friendship and love and oppression and how and when and whether to fight. The elements are compelling and well-balanced and I recommend it -- but maybe not on a day when you're already emotionally on edge.
luminositylibrary's review against another edition
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
nadhirasatria's review
5.0
A fantastic book written by my friend, Alistair. I absolutely love the rep in this book and the book was so good!
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