Not Alone

Product Information

Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. This felt so very claustrophobic, and while I can’t say I had a ‘good’ time with this, I did find it a powerful read.

Five years after a toxic microplastics storm killed most of the population, Katie remains in her one-bedroom flat with her young son, Harry, only venturing outside to forage and hunt. And hey, I’ve read my fair share of feminist revenge stories, but the number of times this book attempts to drive that point home it just became one dimensional in nature. It's something she never would have risked, if it weren't for a renewed glimmer of hope that her lost fiancé, Jack, may not have died during the storm as she previously believed. She meets people who are very kind and risk their lives for her, but "they're strangers" (even though she spent days with them and left her son with them at one point) so it's not good enough.

She's creepily jealous and possessive of her son when an older grandmotherly woman offers to watch him for her and tries to prevent anyone from telling her kid anything about the world. It's something all parents can relate to, as so many of us worry about the world our children are going to inherit. I also found Katie a sympathetic lead--her struggle to raise a child, especially given the circumstances leading up to and involving his birth, and keep him safe in this new environment, and trying to find a balance in keeping him safe and teaching him how to cope was both heartbreaking and solid. I found it well written and I flew through it; even though relatively little happens except for the mundane rituals of Katie's and Harry's survival, there are real moments of heart-in-your-throat-action amid some of the more repetitive parts (this is mostly in the dust itself and the mask wearing, which gets repeated over and over). We learn about Kate’s possibly stalling career and Leo’s plan to apply to acting schools against his mother’s wishes.

Their safe place now feeling unsafe and after a revelation showing Katie’s fiancé may still be alive, Katie takes Harry on a previously unthinkable journey to find the man she was supposed to marry and a new life for her son. The toxicity of plastic dust is probably something we should worry about, although perhaps for now, a bit less than Katie does.

Katie has become expert at foraging food from surviving plants and trapping rabbits, foxes, sometimes a dog. Katie narrates the story of her life after the cataclysmic event—a massive North Atlantic hurricane whipping up the tiny aerosolized plastics, landing on the shores of merry old England, and leaving mostly dead bodies in its wake. Currently, there's a crop of climate ravages (not that it's new--The Day After Tomorrow and Waterworld were examples of disaster Hollywood blockbusters). Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). North America was ravaged by the storm, and the toxic dust damages infrastructure, but otherwise Katie is unaware.