Bethany Clift

Mweh. I finished it. So I guess it was entertaining enough for me to invest that much time in it. But I can't really recommend it. I didn't like the main character. I realise I'm not cutting her any slack, but I thought she was selfish and dumb. Maybe in real life I would have been more sympathetic, certainly about her mental issues. But it got annoying to read about. She wants life to be easy, let's everyone take care of her, and is selfishly dishonest.
Supposedly being alone in the world is liberating, at least according to the blurb, but I didn't see it. She may realise what some of her faults are, but without other people present she is incapable of repeating them, so I'm not convinced she ever learned anything.
Freeing a few dogs and then stopping because one of them snaps at you? Seriously, taking a car and driving in the middle of the night when there is no support system left? Then forgetting about gasoline?
Plain stupid and selfish. And yeah, I know the world just ended. But she's just not an admirable person in any way. I don't get why people chose to be her friend. Maybe because she was needy and they wanted to take care of her. I really don't know.
This was not a book for me.… (mehr)

Last One at the Party presents the reader with a story that's essentially a hyperbole of our current reality. A pandemic sweeps the world unchecked by attempts to constrain it. But instead of leaving most people merely inconvenienced, 6DM kills everyone in its path. Almost everyone. fewer than one in a million survive it.

Our nameless heroine is pretty much the worst possible person to survive something like this. She's selfish, tedious, insipid. She wilfully condemns various helpless animals to death, acknowledging their desperation and then moving on. Not since Heathcliff and Catherine have I come across main characters I hated so intensely.

As we get to know her, we see she's been battling severe depression and crippling anxiety for years even before the pandemic. Add PTSD after the fact and, well, she doesn't cope well. But she definitely shows emotional growth over the course of the book – it just takes her a long, long, loooooong time to get there.

It reminded me a lot of Anne Corlett's The Space Between the Stars.

To be honest, I'm not certain whether I actually liked this book. For a solid 90% of it, I despised the main character. But I'll tell you what: I could not put it down. And I've got such a serious book hangover from it, that I haven't been able to get into another book since.… (mehr)