Genre: Dystopian/Science
Fiction/Romance
Description:
“After being left for dead by her survivor group, Allie Dawes has been
living in an underground bunker for the first year of the zombie apocalypse.
Her only company is Morrigan, a goddess who has gifted Allie with prophetic
dreams and abilities that seem to have brought more trouble than good into her
life. Just when the isolation is starting to make Allie wonder if she’s losing
her mind, Morrigan sends her a dream with a mission: save Cameron Hale.
Cameron Hale is trying like hell to get back to his group and their
community of settlements, where they are starting to rebuild society. On the
way, he stumbles into the path of a massive zombie horde. Cam’s only hope for
escape is to outrun the monsters, but he’s on the verge of exhaustion. Then an
angel with a rifle snatches him, quite literally, from the jaws of death.
In Allie’s bunker, these two touch-starved, PTSD-ridden people who
don’t quite feel like strangers find themselves drawn to each other physically
and emotionally. But love isn’t simple in a world where the undead walk the
earth, and even if Allie and Cam manage to stay alive during the struggles that
await them outside the bunker, their tenuous bond may not survive.”
Author:
“Phoebe Walker is the pen name of co-authors and longtime best friends
Jennifer ‘Jay’ Bull and Mary Morris. Jay lives with her husband and her cats in
rural Illinois, where she works as a writer and a professional psychic. She
began making up stories and characters in her mind at a very young age and
always loved sharing them with others, so writing became a natural creative
outlet. Jay collects tarot decks and cats, but her spouse has put a limit on
cat collecting, so she only has the care of three tiny terror beasts. Mary grew
up reading romance novels and SFF epics on a farm in southeastern Illinois.
After earning an MFA in fiction, she has worked as a proofreader, copy editor,
reporter, and English professor; today, she is an educator and freelance editor
who has published short fiction and nonfiction in various lit mags. She lives
in the middle of nowhere with her husband, her children, and miscellaneous
cats.”
Appraisal:
While willing to consider books of almost any fiction genre, I tend to
shy away from science fiction although books in the dystopian subgenre are the
most likely exception. While I’ll read romance, it is relatively rare, although
a bit of a romantic subtext is no big deal. This book, while definitely falling
outside my normal mild doses of sci-fi and romance still hit the spot in spite
of that. The romance, while an important part of the overall book and
definitely fitting the conventions of the genre, seemed perfectly natural (in
spite of the very unnatural setting of the book). The premise of the book and
how things shake out for our main characters involved a lot of unique twists
that I had no idea what was coming next. Figuring out how to live in a world
that has changed in so many ways, who to trust, and how far to trust them, and
just how to survive this wild and strange world the characters found themselves
in was a vicarious adventure I’m glad I took.
Buy now
from: Amazon US Amazon UK
FYI:
Some adult language and relatively mild
adult situations.
Format/Typo
Issues:
Review is based on an ARC (advance reader/reviewer copy), so I can’t
gauge the final product in this area.
Rating: ****
Four Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate word count: 105-110,000 words
