Okay, I didn’t know anything about this book and I am so glad I didn’t. To have the story unfold in it’s own way made this delightful, breathless and surprisingly poignant reading. In that spirit, I will not spoil here.
M.R. Carey is a pseudonym for Mike Carey, writer and creator of the Felix Castor series (which I have got to check out ASAP!) among other things. I remember him from his excellent run of Lucifer comics for Vertigo back in the day. Still, what little I knew about him did not prepare me for this novel.
Melanie waits every morning in her cell to be taken to class. Bit by bit we get information from her point of view about what is happening and the shape of her world as she knows it. In subsequent chapters different narrators flesh out the details and create more scope to the story. It’s pretty interesting reading, with some pathos and hard science and post-apocalyptic stuff thrown in. Then, less than a hundred pages in, the story takes on an urgency that is electric. This is a 400 page novel and I’m telling you now that you will have a very difficult time putting it down in that last three hundred pages. I only did so out of necessity, then would dive headlong back into this absorbing tale. You’ll be riveted. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, it’ll become a part of you. Just go get this book already.
