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anxiousnachos's review against another edition
dark
reflective
3.5
Maybe 3.5 stars.
I had such high hopes for this one, I thought it would be one of my favourites of the year. It isn’t that. Ultimately, this felt like a collection of stories and had all the issues that mean I choose not to ever read collections of stories. This is a bleak and yet hopeful look at the future of humanity after a pandemic told through snippets of lives of people who cross over over many centuries. They are distinct enough that it feels more like a collection than a novel. As with every collection I’ve ever read, some stories are far far better than others. It also very much had the air of literary fiction not wanting to stoop to genre fiction? Maybe that was the fault of the publisher/marketing but this felt like it would have done much better as true genre, it felt a bit too weird and wacky and scifi to work as literary fiction for me.
Anyway, there were moments of real beauty, definitely. But I actually think my favourite moments were the first and last stories. The meat in the middle never quite lived up to either end of the book.
Content warnings: pandemic, infection disease/plague, dead bodies, dissection, death of loved ones, death of child, mass death, terminal illness, blood, medical content, suicide, euthanasia
I had such high hopes for this one, I thought it would be one of my favourites of the year. It isn’t that. Ultimately, this felt like a collection of stories and had all the issues that mean I choose not to ever read collections of stories. This is a bleak and yet hopeful look at the future of humanity after a pandemic told through snippets of lives of people who cross over over many centuries. They are distinct enough that it feels more like a collection than a novel. As with every collection I’ve ever read, some stories are far far better than others. It also very much had the air of literary fiction not wanting to stoop to genre fiction? Maybe that was the fault of the publisher/marketing but this felt like it would have done much better as true genre, it felt a bit too weird and wacky and scifi to work as literary fiction for me.
Anyway, there were moments of real beauty, definitely. But I actually think my favourite moments were the first and last stories. The meat in the middle never quite lived up to either end of the book.
Content warnings: pandemic, infection disease/plague, dead bodies, dissection, death of loved ones, death of child, mass death, terminal illness, blood, medical content, suicide, euthanasia
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Blood, Chronic illness, Terminal illness, Child death, Suicide, and Medical content
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