this book had a lot of potential, but ultimately it just didn't win me over.

hi, have we just met??? if so, let me tell you that i love large-scale survival stories and i love teen dystopian novels. i'm not even hiding in the shadows about it anymore. and there are some good ones and there are some bad ones. this one is grouped in my mind with the susan beth pfeffer last survivors trilogy, which means it is conceptually strong, but is unrealistic in its portrayal of human response. more on that later.

the first third of this book is great. lucy is sixteen, and alone. her family have all died from the virulent strain of smallpox that wiped out most of the world. she is living alone in central park in a shelter she built herself, struggling with the day-to-day necessities of survival (including tsunami-avoidance), dirty and stinky and wounded and not at all the way the front cover would have you believe. she is more like this troll creature, crouching warily and snatching for food. like nell!!!! my favorite part of this is that she has this survival manual she snatched from the floor of a looted bookstore (maybe my bookstore!!!), from which she is desperately trying to turn a stubborn turtle into food. no one ever has a survival manual in these books, and it is great that this character thought of this as she was looting. points scored, there.

she has one knife, and some sweatshirts. she has some bottles for water. and that's pretty much it. (oh, and her yearbook, which was never really explained properly for me, considering she was a wallflower loner type) but that aside, the early survival stuff is great. but too brief.

because then - people. and one she joins up with people and a boyyyyyy and some love quadrangle and some betrayal and danger and confusing fight scenes and a villain that - whaaaat? i just stopped caring.

survival stuff = great. pack of dogs that will come and getcha??
wonderful.

moony eyes and rival glares??
prioritize, kids!!

mild spoilers where i talk around what happens, but you might want to avoid if you are sensitive to that kinda stuff : (view spoiler)[, but i'm saying in a world where 99% of the population has been killed by disease and tsunamis hit new york at unpredictable intervals etc etc., the few remaining survivors would be foolish to overlook or forgive people who make really big mistakes that get people killed when the mistakes are made out of stupid teen jealousy. different ballpark.

and seriously, a cartoony villain who kills people when there are hardly any people left at all?? people still have uses, even if their makeup isn't tailored to your own medical needs. breed them, figure out things from that if you have to, but otherwise it just seems wasteful. and that this villain would have normal, educated people being cool with this (to a point) following orders... i don't care how scared they are, it doesn't seem plausible. and don't bring up historical precedent here, because this is a totally different context, and there was no convincing reason why their obedience to atrocities would have been the case here, in this set of circumstances. there was zero reason to kill anyone here. it wasn't race-hatred or patriotic idealism or anything like that, which is gross, but at least everyone in those cases have the same ultimate goal and philosophy. it was arbitrary, and i think people formerly in the medical profession, apocalypse or not, would not have just killed people for no reason while still retaining enough human compassion to be kindly in other scenes. i mean, these aren't mad scientists blinded by nazi propaganda here; these are just regular folks. is this just rosy fucking optimism on my part?? the last third of the book nosedived pretty fast for me. (hide spoiler)]

that was a long spoiler, for those of you who didn't peek. it may or may not be a true spoiler. i don't care. if there is a sequel, i will probably read it - i read all the pfeffers, even though they were kind of weak, but i hope that the next one will just be a little tighter and focus more on the strengths (survival know-how), and less on the weaker elements of cackling eeeevil and sullen youth.