So, here's the thing. I love a good disaster book. I love weird genetic engineering bullshit books (at least as a child, I have loved them). This book felt like an absolute slog. There are so many kernels of something interesting. So much of the book is about being forced from the only home someone has ever known and the constant dissolution and reconvening of government structures. Smith clearly is looking to deal with this, or at least gives himself so many places to play around with the meaning of membership in a people group and the way that that impact's a person's actions. We see it to some extent with Liza, how she copes with lines on a map (and an entire ocean) being a barrier to a future with a hot man before realizing that now that everybody that survives is about to live together is going to be in the same place. She has a leadership role. She speaks at parliament. She's a civic paragon. She leads the demand that parents be allowed to go to McMurdo city. She handles parts of negotiations. In no time do we really see her grapple all that much with the question of having lived in Hope City and being suborned to the will of McMurdo City, beyond saying she doesn't want to split her family. She is looking at wreckage directly linked to her own participation in human genetic engineering and her daughter, and she just kind of shrugs it off before she goes on her long walk home, no meditation, nothing. But the one that drives me insane on this is the fact that we have Yotam, who is on his Israeli Defense Force service when the whole of humanity is forced to either die or leave. We have one of the most famous instances of settler colonialism facing being displaced by a settler colonial alien force, and we have issues directly relating to the wars that Israel stokes. What do we do with what seems like the most important aspect? Functionally, nothing. Yotam names the human replacement he looks after after his dead unrealized love interest who invited him to bone for a month while humanity waited to be eliminated 20 years ago. He has been seen to be a humanizing force who might be tricked into destruction. Honestly, I could write this just on tropes related to Yotam and come away with this being just... bizarre on so many levels. But what it comes down to is that this book opens so many questions about nationhood, belonging, and the survival of settler colonialism that it's honestly funny to turn it into what it is, and it's incredibly annoying to have some legitimately interesting questions raised and posed, and then not even the reader discussion guide at the back touches them.

I'm so mad I'm going to inflict this on book club.