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"It's taken all my life to learn protection is the promise you can't make. It is absolute, and you mean it and believe it, but that vow is provisional and makeshift and no god ever lived who could keep it half the time."

Oh gosh you guys, this book. I forget who I first saw reading it but I took one look at the description and knew I wanted to read it, too.

It's a slow burning dystopian novel that's less focused on how fucked up the world has become and turns instead towards the aching emptiness we would do anything to fill when we lose the one we love the most. Yes, sure, the richest of the rich bitches have taken over, an elite sixteen referred to as the astronauts, and yes, there are giant medical freighters out on Lake Superior conducting test trials on volunteers and cranking out a suicide drug called Willow, and yes, food and books can be hard to come by at times, but our narrator Rainy, a gentle giant of a man, is doing his best to live life as close to normal as possible and that's mainly because he has the love of his life Lark at his side. Until one day, he doesn't.

After allowing a sketchy but kind stranger to rent out a room in their attic, Rainy suddenly finds himself haunted by grief and shock and caught up in a situation he can only control by escaping, and escape he does, towards the safest and warmest memory of his wife he has, heading out towards a remote set of islands called the Slates.

Driven by the desperate hope of his wife's ghost meeting him out there, Rainy comes face to face with nasty storms at sea, horrid toll bridge workers, a group of air rifle packing punks, and befriends a young girl attempting to escape a bad home situation, all while trying to keep the people who took his wife from him from catching up to him first.

I didn't expect to like this book as much as I did. It's very reminiscent of Per Peterson's books, who is an author I absolutely adore. Rainy is one of the most likeable, most laid back characters I've read in a while. He has so much heart and an incredible knack of making the best of the worst situations. I just wanted to reach into the pages and give him a big ole bear hug most of the book, and I'm not a hugger so that should tell you something.