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This book is ridiculously good, I don’t know why more people haven’t read it yet but they should! Starting the second of the series immediately at 4 am
This was a really fascinating read! Imagine a future in which the world has been taken over by incredibly aggressive gene-modded plants, humans are on the edge of collapsing below minimum genetic diversity, living in isolated low-tech tribal villages, using the dregs of their old tech to keep the plants at bay and scrape by. Koli finds a piece of tech that both lifts him up and casts him out and through his eyes we get to see both village life and how the rest of the world is coping. I always enjoy Carey's characters and writing style and this is no exception. Recommended! (And a trilogy, so be aware you'll have two more you'll want to read after this one!)
First, thank you to NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I had a hard time settling on a rating for this book, because my personal hangup with it is probably easily overlooked by someone else. To get the good out of the way first, the premise is extremely interesting. Here you have Koli, this country village bumpkin living within his little bubble of what he knows in what is soon revealed to be a dystopian, post-apocalyptic England. His life gets upended at some point (maybe a little further along than I would have liked) through a well-meaning but ultimately misguided attempt to acquire some "tech", and he finds himself on quite a little adventure. The plot is fun, intense in places, and a little thought-provoking in others.
To touch on the bad, first and foremost, the book is written from the …
First, thank you to NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I had a hard time settling on a rating for this book, because my personal hangup with it is probably easily overlooked by someone else. To get the good out of the way first, the premise is extremely interesting. Here you have Koli, this country village bumpkin living within his little bubble of what he knows in what is soon revealed to be a dystopian, post-apocalyptic England. His life gets upended at some point (maybe a little further along than I would have liked) through a well-meaning but ultimately misguided attempt to acquire some "tech", and he finds himself on quite a little adventure. The plot is fun, intense in places, and a little thought-provoking in others.
To touch on the bad, first and foremost, the book is written from the viewpoint of this uneducated country boy, with all the narrating baggage that implies. Descriptions are sometimes hard to follow because Koli doesn't always have the words to describe what he's seeing. Intentionally bad grammar abounds, because the book takes the form of him relating his adventures to you as a story. Things were also told a bit out of order in the beginning because Koli would start to relate something to you, or insinuate something, and then backtrack from it with lines akin to "but I need to tell you this first before I tell you that". It was mildly annoying to read, at times. I also feel like some of the thought-provoking parts about civilization gone astray were heavy handed in places. Finally, the beginning sort of drags. It takes about half the book before Koli finally gets his call to action and the plot starts picking up.
So, summarizing, I ended up giving this a 3.5/5, because I had a hard time getting through the writing style to the meat underneath (maybe I'm a shallow person), and because the beginning felt like it dragged on a bit long.
