The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison

read by Angela Dawe

Earth Abides meets Children of Men with a little Parable of the Sower thrown in for good measure in this post-apocalyptic tale about a midwife wandering a world in which almost everybody has died of a plague, very few of the survivors are women, and childbirth has become universally deadly.

The conceit here is that a professional midwife from San Francisco falls sick with an illness that has been killing a lot of her patients and wakes up in the hospital an indeterminate number of days later to find that everybody is dead. (Walking Dead, anyone?) But not quite everyone, it turns out; there are a few survivors roaming around. The vast majority of this handful of survivors are men, and this is not good news for the small number of women and even tinier number of children who are left.

Our midwife, who never gives out her real name, keeps a journal of her travels. The beauty of this book is the way the journal is written. Not that it’s beautifully written; on the contrary, it’s full of irrelevant asides and repetitive typographical quirks. It’s also very convincing—you feel, as you read, that someone you know might have written it. The world she comes from is ours, and the world she lives in is recognizably what our world would probably become in the wake of that particular disaster.

As the story progresses, this sense that the protagonist is a very real person just gets stronger. She’s strong, but not superheroically strong. She’s tough in some ways but fragile in others, like we all are. She’s smart enough to avoid making stupid horror-trope mistakes, but not so smart that we can’t identify with her perfection. We believe in her, which makes the trauma she goes through every single day matter. And what she does about it matters, too.

The most moving post-apocalyptic story I’ve read in a long time. Highly recommend.

Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis: #tbt review

A catastrophic water shortage has divided the world into two groups: those who have reliable access to safe drinking water, and those who would do anything to get it. 

Lynn’s life is simple: she and her mom trust nobody, depend on nobody but each other, and spend their nights in their basement and their days doing whatever it takes to feed themselves and to protect their pond. Then strangers appear, Lynn’s world turns upside down, and she has to reevaluate everything she’s ever been taught.

This book starts out grim and gets grimmer; it’s not going to make a convert of anybody who isn’t already a fan of intensely dark dystopian fiction. The protagonist is a remorseless killer and the threat (and sometimes the reality) of rape, slavery, and lesser forms of violence are never entirely absent. But for readers who like this sort of thing and can hang on through several chapters during which there seems to be little point in caring about characters whose lives are so precarious, there is a big payoff. 

Lynn’s claustrophobic world grows whether she likes it or not, and she’s got to find a way to grow with it or die. Fortunately, there’s a core of resilience and a desire for connection buried deep within the many layers of rigid self-sufficiency and misanthropy that her mother has armored her with, and she’s able to grope her way toward an extremely hard-won redemption. 

It’s an ambiguous redemption at best, though, tainted by irreparable losses: the implacable and deeply disturbing forces at play in this horrific and all-too-plausible future aren’t going anywhere. Thoughtfully and realistically written; well above average for books of this genre; but definitely not for the faint of heart or for younger teens. Highly recommended for readers who loved The Hunger Games or Divergent.