I'm frustrated that I was working on a review and Goodreads lost it when I finished the book.

On the recommendation of a friend, I started this book via audiobook. I listened to the first 45% in 4-hour chunks. It's about a 33 hour listen. It had a big learning curve and information to absorb and was giving me headaches. There were a number of contributions to that - including reading the book at the start of the covid-19 pandemic. When my library loan ran out, I didn't continue.

However, my friend runs a book group and said we were doing our online meeting and gave a week's notice. So I checked the e-book out of the library and finished it in about 6 days.

While the first half is a lot and somewhat difficult to get through, the second half really gets going. There are a lot of characters and some of the introductions really irked me. It had some of the "why is this person here now? why were they introduced this way?" But then some of those characters became ones that I grew fond of.

Wendig did his homework for the fungal pandemic, as evident by his acknowledgements. Some of it is similar to Mira Grant's Parasitology. I wondered if Wendig read any of that or if both authors just follow the science.

Wendig's presentation of depression via Daria Stewart was a good representation. There are so many problematic presentations of mental illness in literature and I was pleased with how this one was. I liked how they discussed how Shana, who is not completely likable as a character, has some of those same attributes. There's a lot of on-the-nose for the current day politics and pandemic presented, as though Wendig is prescient or at least has a strong handle on human behavior and logical conclusions.

While the first half of the book was via audiobook and so much information, and the second half then zoomed along, overall I enjoyed the book. The things that are different in Wanderers from today's pandemic make the book readable, even small things like a fungus rather than a virus, and the AI aspect, and what the AI does. I have a concern that people will not want to read this book as time goes on because they've already lived through a pandemic and the fictional story is less interesting and escapism for them.

As an aside, Wendig is fun to follow on Twitter.

This is not quite the review I wrote in the first place that Goodreads lost, but it gives some of my thoughts while reading this story. I'm glad my friend recommended it. I'm glad I read it.