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A review by book_lizard42
Not Alone by Sarah K. Jackson
2.0
Holy hell. I did NOT like this book. Too tangled in the minutiae. Like, it's been 15 pages. Are you still trying to get the car going? I started skipping pages. Anything happening? Nope. Still in the car.
The most irritating thing for me was the sexual assault that resulted in Harry. Like, life is hard enough in a dystopian world. It felt absolutely unnecessary to throw that in there. I absolutely HATE when authors use rape as a plot point that does absolutely nothing to further the story. It's there to be there. Like, how much more bleak does the story really need to be?! Almost everyone is dead, her fiance is presumed dead, she lives alone with her 4.5 year-old who has never been outside, she has to forage for dead things and plants to eat, they are always hungry, the air is death to breathe, etc. So now she's on the move to look for fiance who she refers to as "Daddy" when talking to her annoying child, but who isn't, actually, the father. Was it necessary? No. Did it add anything at all to the story? It did not. The story would have been EXACTLY THE SAME level of tedious even without rape as a plot point.
The most irritating thing for me was the sexual assault that resulted in Harry. Like, life is hard enough in a dystopian world. It felt absolutely unnecessary to throw that in there. I absolutely HATE when authors use rape as a plot point that does absolutely nothing to further the story. It's there to be there. Like, how much more bleak does the story really need to be?! Almost everyone is dead, her fiance is presumed dead, she lives alone with her 4.5 year-old who has never been outside, she has to forage for dead things and plants to eat, they are always hungry, the air is death to breathe, etc. So now she's on the move to look for fiance who she refers to as "Daddy" when talking to her annoying child, but who isn't, actually, the father. Was it necessary? No. Did it add anything at all to the story? It did not. The story would have been EXACTLY THE SAME level of tedious even without rape as a plot point.