A strong collection of post apocalyptic and/or dystopian short stories -- they aren't all to my taste, but I appreciated the range of work, it's consistent good writing, and the great variety of imagination displayed. Excellent anthology. ( )

Good for high school. Short story collection, speculative future fiction. Recommend for students who enjoy The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, and/or books with zombies or pandemics. ( )

I enjoy post-apocalyptic fiction, and so I liked quite a number of stories in this anthology. An anthology of it gives a chance to explore a wide variety of different apocalypses -- from nanotechnology (Kiernan's "Fake Plastic Trees"), transgenic crops (Castellucci's "The Marker"), unexplained alien or supernatural interventions (Kressel's "The Great Game at the End of the World", Nix's "You Won't Feel a Thing"), plagues and political repression (Dunn's "Before"), zombies (Carrie Ryan's "After the Cure", which was great); environmental destruction (a lot of them), to guns and politics (Ford's "Blood Drive"). ( )

I actually calculated the average rating I gave each short story and averaged out to exactly a 2.5. There were some really great stories in here, but most of them just lacked something. On the whole, I'm rather "meh" about this anthology. Full review to come. ( )

Sadly, there were more bad stories than good in this compilation. But the ones that were good were REALLY good and I would love to see them be fleshed out as novels. A good, quick read for older teens who like dystopian books. ( )