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A review by alongreader
Zero O'Clock by C J Farley
3.0
2020 was probably the most significant year we'll see in a long time. Fiction set in that time is starting to arrive on our shelves now. And I can definitely say, this is - one of those.
There isn't really a plot, as such. It's an almost day by day narration of Geth's life as the Covid crises looms, crashes, peaks and retreats (a bit). Geth's mother is an ER nurse so Geth knows better than most how things are going. It doesn't help that her mother's boyfriend has decided to move his ex-wife's son in, and into Geth's bedroom besides.
There's a scene relatively early on that kind of exemplifies my problem with this book. Geth is thinking about Donald Trump, the then president, but rather than uses his name she uses a variety of names of villians from Game of Thrones, never the same name twice, and doesn't explain this decision until right at the end of the section. Believe it or not, there are people out there who didn't watch Game of Thrones, wouldn't have picked up those names, and thus would have spent that whole section wondering who all these people that Geth was angry at are. If the explanation had come first, things would have been better.
I didn't hate this book, it isn't awful, but it's probably not one I'll revisit, sadly.
There isn't really a plot, as such. It's an almost day by day narration of Geth's life as the Covid crises looms, crashes, peaks and retreats (a bit). Geth's mother is an ER nurse so Geth knows better than most how things are going. It doesn't help that her mother's boyfriend has decided to move his ex-wife's son in, and into Geth's bedroom besides.
There's a scene relatively early on that kind of exemplifies my problem with this book. Geth is thinking about Donald Trump, the then president, but rather than uses his name she uses a variety of names of villians from Game of Thrones, never the same name twice, and doesn't explain this decision until right at the end of the section. Believe it or not, there are people out there who didn't watch Game of Thrones, wouldn't have picked up those names, and thus would have spent that whole section wondering who all these people that Geth was angry at are. If the explanation had come first, things would have been better.
I didn't hate this book, it isn't awful, but it's probably not one I'll revisit, sadly.