Rose is living in a remote camp working as an escort. Men within the camp are digging to build an epic campus, the dream of their leader. Women are brought in to keep the men happy. But she has a bigger mission, to spy for a man who will offer her residency and chance to stop being an escort. She learns that all is not what it seems in the camp. In a different camp, we see a group of women surviving in an old climate station. We are told the story of how they got there and given a second glimpse of what it is to survive in this world.
Y’all know dystopian is my jam, but this one took forever to really get interesting. It’s billed as a riveting page turner but the pace was really quite glacial. I liked the unfolding of the uncertain world but I had to divide up the beginning of the book into smaller pieces and force myself to stick with it. I’m glad I did, because the last 20% was really great, I loved how the two stories came together. But it was a bit of a slow road to get there. I enjoyed the White Alice sub-story much more than the Camp Zero story. I also didn’t love the ending, I wish it had ended a chapter earlier.
Thanks to Atria Books for gifted access via Netgalley. All opinions above are my own.
If the world was ending would you want to be one of the survivors forging a new way forward or are you like me, hoping to die quickly in the first wave of whatever it is?
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