Oh, this book had such a cool set up, but just couldn’t seem to live up to it! Set about 150 years in the future, The Dead Lands focuses on a society built among the ruins of St. Louis. This community, known as the Sanctuary, is all that remains of the United States after a super flu, and then nuclear war, wipes everyone out. Or so they’ve been led to believe. Then one day, a slightly-mutant girl (Gawea, as in Saca-) shows up at the Sanctuary, searching out their museum’s curator, Lewis Meriwether (get it?). She convinces him, along with Mina Clark (get it? get it?), Clark’s brother, her extremely annoying boyfriend and an elderly doctor to make the trek to Oregon, seeking out the community she comes from — a community rich with water and food, resources that the Sanctuary lacks. Meanwhile, Lewis’s assistant, Ella, and a street rat named Simon discover that not all is as it seems in the Sanctuary…
It sounds so cool, right? And it starts out pretty cool, too. The set up — particularly the after-effects of nuclear winter — works wonderfully. But Clark and her boyfriend (Reed) are fucking insufferable, and I dreaded their part of the story — which was, like, most of it. Back at the Sanctuary, the spunky Ella and her infatuated sidekick liven things up a bit — but not enough to salvage this one.
