specificwonderland's reviews
819 reviews

I was trying to figure out why I was reading this book for most of the time I was reading it. It's fast-paced, urgently mysterious, and alpha male (not my usual search terms).

As the story drew to a close, I think I figured out how this book came into my orbit. Maybe 5-10y ago, I read a pair of really good books like this, fast-paced, almost Bourne Identity-like, with a mystery and sci-fi elements. The series was John Scalzi's Lock In (I think there were only 2 books, or maybe 2 and a prequel?). This book has similar flavoring: astute, shiny, male detective who is "on the case", mysterious science

in a dystopian society

, and a ticking clock device, in this case, figure it out before the town kills you.

Plot points I took issue with:

if his family was there, why didn't Pope or anyone bait him with that at the jump. Yo Ethan why are you struggling so hard to bail when Teresa and Ben are.....right here? And just Beverly's character in general (a nod to IT?)...she was trying to help him but no one at the bar knew her? Or did they just say they didn't know her? They didn't do a great job of keeping those 2 apart if Beverly was a threat to this utopia. Last thing I can think of, plot wise, only because I was a phlebotomist for almost 20y....when you get surgery in a normal hospital, they don't give you your sedative through a normal venipuncture, it's through your IV so they can also give you pain meds, saline, etc. I guess maybe the justification here I could give them is this wasn't a normal hospital, it was some Podunk half-staffed facility staffed by idiots who were barely online and working with limited equipment (although the reveal tells us the founder was a billionaire who spent "billions on r&d" so I would think they're not starving for supplies or staff).

Some of the phrasing was clunky and took me out of the narrative. One example was "She took out a glass, squirted water all over the ice." Is it just me? What a strange way to describe that, in the actual word selection and the phrasing/grammar. Another example was the writer describing the river noise, how it rushed by with a "purr". Um, what? Other than that, it definitely gave a Thin Blue Line, home of the free because of the brave, Toby Keith, xenophobic vibe and when I reached the end, I wasn't sure if the writer crafted this vibe for this book or if the writer's own traits were peeking through this "fiction". Either way, it put me off the rest of the series, but I think if you also enjoyed the Lock In series, this is another series to check out!

Update - I googled his author bio and fwiw his Wikipedia says he fought his wife for medical rights of their kids to vaccinate them, so he seems more lib than I picked up on in the book. 

Uhhh. 

I couldn't put it down until about 50%.

When they started hinting around maybe other consciousness' were placed in bodies, I felt alarm bells going off. I put it down for a few days. I think I read somewhere (a blurb for the book? A Facebook group?) this book is The Strangers meets Get Out and when we started to see glimpses of the Get Out plot, I immediately lost interest.

It was tense. It was atmospheric. I, too, found it to be somewhat HOL-adjacent, with the footnotes, evidence, and the undulating floorplan. I'm impressed this writer got published, I've never done that. But I think this could've tightened up in some ways. 

Questions I still have: 
Is Shylo ok? 
Why did Thomas show up? With the title, did he just used to (always) live here? He just does this anytime someone moves in? Did an evil entity just pick Eve to drive her crazy for fun? The kids were all in on it? When Jenni asked about her wrist tattoo, was that her breaking character? 
What did the address change matter? Just another symptom of her "insanity"? 
Does Thomas's dad being in a band matter? 
Is this a scary story about Capgras syndrome? 
Is it a paranormal haunting story? 
Was the whole town in on it to keep using the hatches for whatever weird body possession they were doing? 
Why did the officer get so mad interrogating Eve, when he seemed okayish talking to Andrew? 

At the end, I didn't care to revisit my questions and I don't think I'll think about this book again. It had real potential the first half and then kinda felt like it was throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck. I thought the woman chasing her through the basement was scary but her final few apotheoses with Charlie, Thomas were either overwrought or lackadaisical. On the pro side, it was fun hearing local places shouted out and I'd probably give the writer one more chance with another book! 

The Thin Kid reigns. 

Women boldly living alone. Interesting read! What would you do if you were trapped behind a wall, not knowing if your family or friends were dead or alive? Everyone around you seems to have been killed, including animals. How would you navigate this new world?

Good storytelling, ending was too emotional 

Increasingly sad, it started out flippant and benign but I grew to love the characters over their lives. 

Essays about troubled relationships with mothers. 

Good pacing, unpredictable plot, but I thought the ending was kinda mid. 

Good creepy atmosphere 

I got this as a rec from a friend who read it in her book club, and I really enjoyed it! I had at least one question though, if anyone feels like chiming in on their interpretation.

Okay, the beginning where she's able to tell herself stories and has eruptions, was that a sexual climax? She didn't have typical female reproductive processes but she was still capable of pleasure, by teasing herself with long, winding stories?

I think it's interesting she had curiosity

for curiosity's sake, and that made her very human. The other women wrote knowledge off, what could you ever need this for, but she wanted to know, because she wanted to know. And in some cases, it came in handy later, when she encountered things on her journey. I found the reading/counting a little unbelievable but let it go for the sake of the story. Okay, she was able to make the leap of sounding out "cabin" from some word on a package and recycling bin? Sure, Jan. But I do think it's possible if you had no other distractions you could become so automated in counting to count even in your sleep.

I was mildly curious what happened, but the plot resolution wouldn't have improved the story that much for me. I think the plot's holes gave me background thoughts to muse on while

I got bogged down in her repetition of doing the same thing every day, whether within the bunker or exploring the barren tundra/chaparral.

Things firmly in the "Alien Planet" = yes column: the gardening book, the wobbly timey-wimey stuff, the lack of biodiversity/climate/terrain variation. Gas masks?

Things firmly in the "Alien Planet" = no column: they can breathe the air. Cars. The massive, unending amount of food (seems really expensive to setup this colony but not impossible), the bunker wasn't like, pressurized or any kind of atmospheric difference, they were roughly 24h days (though my googling doesn't really tell me if a 21.5h day is possible from sunset to sunset?)

Some things I wondered:

if they had come upon another group of women, would anyone have tried to use currency, slavery, subjugation, anything evil-leaning? Were the women corruptible? If the women had splintered off more fully, would anyone have created any war-like systems? Is war more inherently "masculine" and does the author think women are more egalitarian and placable/passive than men, or better at working together? If she would have found a man/group of men, would they have hurt her? Would any of the women ever start trafficking or prostitution or exploiting other women for sexual gain? If she had found an animal, would she have developed fondness for it and felt like it was her pet? There's a horse Ayla befriends/tames in the Clan of the Cavebear series and I wondered how our MC would do with an animal, does she have the capacity to love and desire closeness/touch/friendship with?

I thought there were some interesting questions about life:

if you are missing fundamental experiences (touch, romance, pets) during captivity and you become "free" are you really free? If you're alone forever, what kind of life is that? is that freedom? Is that more of a punishment than all the women who died together in the cages?

Other books/works I found similar/parallels to this work that you might like if you liked this:

The webcomic Woman World (no men, woman only future), Room (emma donoghue) (a child grows up with no outside world interaction), Clan of the Cavebear (a strong curious woman exploring the world during caveman times, meeting different communities, after being expelled from her boomer-type clan for being different)