Not Alone

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I think it could have delivered a much more compelling and chilling story if Harry had some sort of survival instinct from the beginning. She hopes her fiance, a military veteran named Jack, can raise Harry after she, too, succumbs to the dust.

After a microplastic storm devastates the world and leaves Katie and her five-year-old son Harry as two of the few survivors in England, they must learn to live in isolation. Through Katie’s eyes, he’s nothing but a threat, but there are degrees of ambiguity to how threatening he really is.

I wanted her to succeed, to make it, the same way I want that for me, the same way I want that for my friends, and there aren’t a whole lot of books or media that have pulled that feeling out of me. I'm not sure how to rate this, because as I enjoyed the plot of the book, there was so many things I did not enjoy about this book. The note describes his destination and explains how she can get there with the resources he secreted away.

At a time when stepping outside could kill you, Harry is kept indoors at all costs, never venturing beyond the door to their one-bedroom flat. She decides to take Harry from all he’s ever known and go on a journey to attempt to find Jack and make a better life for Harry. The bodies begin to build up around them and layers of poisonous dust hang heavily in the air, seeping into the soil and slowly killing anything attempting to cling onto the natural world. The narrator, soon established as Elliot Chase, then zooms out to address the reader directly, introducing the players—most importantly movie star Lana Farrar.At times, the unwritten parts were difficult to work through and I found myself just giving up and going along. They started to find plastic dust in rivers, soils and even the air – and also in the vast oceans, millions of pieces per square metre, washed there like it was a great big watery garbage dump. The novel starts off with a murder, and with seven people trapped on an isolated Greek island lashed by a "wild, unpredictable Greek wind. Currently, there's a crop of climate ravages (not that it's new--The Day After Tomorrow and Waterworld were examples of disaster Hollywood blockbusters). Heartbreaking and dramatic, it was a little slow pacing with too much dwelling and details in some points and not enough in others.

And during the times that I wasn't reading it, my mind was still on Katie and Harry, hoping beyond hope that they were going to make it, that they were going to be okay. When Jack set-off for the hospital, knowing they’d need him when the storm hit, he had no idea that the storm would define the end of ‘Before’ and yield a post-apocalyptic after.It reads like an adventure story that somehow manages to be both bleak and hopeful, and there is an intense immediacy to the narrative that makes it impossible to stop reading. I felt a lot of the going back and forth (duel timelines) from BEFORE the storm was incredibly boring and I really didn't care for what happened 5 years before the storm, between Katie and Jack. During the first months after the storm, Katie ventured out to find Jack, the man she had been due to marry in a few months. The atmosphere of the novel, set mostly on this wild Greek island, echoes strongly the classical tragedies of Greece. But Katie’s lungs are failing, and when she finds a hidden letter from the fiance she'd assumed to be dead, she takes Harry on a journey that will lead them to the northern reaches of Scotland.