After discovering a prehistoric woman trapped in ice at the Arctic Circle, a group of scientists accidentally unleash a virus upon the world that has catastrophic events. This virus turns human organs into weird versions of brains, causing excruciating deaths.Life expectancy isn't that high but can be prolonged through organ transplants, but even that will eventually fail and the person effected will succumb to death. This book explores the effects of this pandemic through various short stories, showing how different people and different organizations deal with this tragic reality.

We see how humanity adapts to this virus. Some make a business out of unique ways of disposing of the dead, with special customized funerals that bring peace to the families of the victims, which sheds light on the opportunistic tendencies of human nature, and rings true to reality.Others try to find ways to defeat this virus, by finding out how it functions by studying its decomposition process through placing the victims in body farms. Others take it a step further and try to find new planets to transport humanity to, having given up on life on earth. Within this collection, we also get to know regular human beings and how they cope with potentially losing their lives or losing the lives of their loved ones.

Despite the interesting premise here, I didn't really have a positive experience reading this book. I don't know if I was just not in the mood for this sort of read, but I found most of the short stories to be redundant and to be regurgitating the same ideas over and over again.I wasn't even expecting this to be a collection of short stories set in the same world, having expected it to be one story instead, so this took me by surprise and negatively impacted my reading experience, since I'm not really in the right mental space to appreciate short stories, knowing that it's hard to form attachments to anyone through this format. I felt like the author tried to fit too many different things into one work, and it just didn't work for me.We even go as far as discovering a new planet and meeting aliens, as well as dipping our toes into some form of fantasy which explores how the universe was created. It just felt like a weird soup of different things that didn't quite mesh well together for me.

This might be enjoyable to some readers though, but just keep in mind that there is no one narrative and this is a collection of short stories. It's a very bleak book with graphic descriptions of death and decomposition, so be prepared for that too.In conclusion, despite the potential, this book wasn't really for me.


 “Opportunities are like little seeds floating in the wind. Your life is there. Some people have a big net to collect them all. Other people need to pray that the right seeds, the best ones, make their way to them with just enough bad ones to appreciate the good.”