When I say this book is unlike anything I’ve ever read, I really mean it. A crazy mix of scifi apocalypse and green fantasy, this story combines the two pretty seamlessly. And that’s something I can’t say I’ve read before. A meteor shower that takes out the human world as we know it, centaurs that live on a magical safeguarded mountain, and the most effortless mass murdering of characters I’ve ever read, this book was strangely very stressful and also very calming at the same time to read. Can you say you’ve read anything like that before?
Published February 16th 2021 by Random House Canada
Right in the middle of this crazy world is Heather, a girl who’s known struggles all her life. Born a little different, her dad was always there for her, telling her fantastic stories of the mountain and it’s creatures. After losing him in a freak accident that caused him to fall off of that mountain, everyone thought she was crazy for saying that there were centaurs living up there. She never ended up leaving her home town, becoming an artist and making money that way. There’s also Tasha, a doctor, Annie, her wife and nurse, Elyse, a sick girl fighting her way through this apocalyptic nightmare, and B, Heather’s husband whom she has twin girls with right at the beginning of the novel just briefly before the meteors take everything out. And weaved in between the chapters are intricate fairy tales, depicting life and death, and everything in between. This book is truly beautiful and a piece of art, in my opinion.
A wild ride from start to finish, this book was everything I could have asked for and more. I say this a lot, but from the description alone I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was sucked in from the moment I started, and I think it’s another one of those books that will be stuck in my head for a long time after I’ve put it down. It had so many twists and turns and stressful moments, like just trying to survive in a world that’s trying to choke you out and starve every human it can find to death, families fighting, food is running out, and everything these characters have known has crumbled. On top of that, Heather has twin baby girls in this new horrifying world, a husband she barely knows and frankly only married so that her children would have a father, and she’s being haunted by not only the people in her town but the life she once knew with her father, and the creatures she knows exist on the mountain but must stay a secret.
I really found like although the world was so different from our own, everything was so easy to imagine, and I really enjoyed getting to know the fairy tales that Heather was taught as a child for myself. The characters were so lifelike despite these massive differences, and really faced the challenges that they were forced to deal with like anyone would really, even though they had their own demons to deal with while that was happening. A world where plants are very obviously trying to take over, poisonous and scary ones, but I think it really shows that humans are able to persevere through almost anything, though there was a very low percentage left at the end. It was still something.
Really what I’m trying to say is that this book is absolutely one of my new favourites. I would love to grab a copy for myself on my bookshelf so that I can re-read it any time I want, because I think it’s just so timeless, that sometime in the near future I will want to re-read it. And if you know me, you know that I’m not usually like that with books. I recommend it to anyone looking for a story of hardship with a fantastic twist on it, who like scifi and apocalypse and mythical creatures, mixed with fairy tales. I would say it’s definitely not something for kids despite that, and there are some “mature” scenes with depictions of sexual coercion that could possibly be triggering for some people. But that being said, they’re very brief and easy to skip over if you are someone who is triggered by things like that.
If you’d like to grab a copy, you can do so here, through my Amazon Associates Link.
And if you’d like to keep up with the author, you can here on Twitter!
Thanks for reading! Hope you’re doing well and reading awesome books like this.
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