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I read this for my real world book club January meeting. I’m really glad that a fellow member suggested it. It had been on my to read shelf but so are thousands of other books that can languish there forever.

This is my kind of book: speculative fiction but with our real world and real people and a plausible story. Pandemic disease is also of interest to me, as are post-apocalyptic books, especially ones that spend a lot of time focusing on day-to-day life, as this one does.

Overall, I think this is a brilliantly told story. It’s very clever. I loved the various storylines and timelines and how they connected with one another, and they did so nearly perfectly. It’s one of those books I’d like to reread and know from the start everyone’s story and what happens to them. I was very grateful for all the flashbacks. My favorite portions tended to be the events that happened right after and right before the collapse, and then I also loved the ending.

I was fascinated by almost all the characters and appreciated that there were always many I could root for, and even the ones I couldn’t, I could feel some empathy for them.

I guessed fairly early on who the prophet was but really had no idea what would happen until it was revealed.

I understand why Shakespeare’s are the plays appealing to (some of) the survivors, and the music too, as they were overall pre-technology so therefore also post technology. I also got a kick out of how a sort of religion/cult could arise from basically nothing, but it made sense. I’m glad that those parts were a relatively small part of the story. At first I thought the wonderful premise for the story didn’t need the extra dramatic plot points, but then it became clear that every character and sub-story were there for a reason.

I think that this is a really thought provoking book and will be good for our book club discussion. It made me think about what matters most, what I could and could tolerate, how I’d fare should these events come to pass and I was one of the survivors. There are many sad parts, some tragic, but I found the book to be so absorbing and not really depressing. There is definitely hope in this story.

One of my pet peeves: What’s with books that have many pages missing page numbers, especially with no pattern as to which pages have numbers and which don’t?!