First book of 2019, and this one sets the bar so high everything else is going to need a ladder to reach it. ( )

Well jeepers, it's like Mira/Seanan is a soothsayer or something.

A pretty gripping novella that, given what 2020 as brought the world, felt darkly real. I loved how the spread of the disease was described in such a simple and clinical way. I was nodding in parts as these were the same kinds of explanations we have heard during our daily televised government COVID updates. A really thought provoking discussion about vaccination with a jaw dropping ending.

I think I need to find a remote island for me and my loved ones to live on so we can stay safely isolated...wait...I live in NZ. Phew. I'm sorted.

I hope everyone and their loved ones are keeping well. Kia Kaha! ( )

And my reading year starts with a clear and loud: meeeeeh

It's difficult having favorite authors because with each book you wish to read something specific from them. So when blunders happen, you just have to deal. Like George Martin writing mild dragon porn but dying without ever finishing that ASoIaF series, Neil Gaiman writing garbage with atrocious titles like "Trigger Warning lulz you special snowflakes" and Mira Grant living her "I think about science, like a lot, would you care to see my worm collection and years of research about germs and shit, no I mean literal shit buddy" life without gracing us with another installment of the most wonderful series ever created, you know, that other one with the killer mermaids.

So you get to learn how to deal with your expectations, pretending you're an adult because good god you're 30 already and this is just a facking book and read something less than the best from an author you know like the back of your hand and you pretend to enjoy it and not wish for it suddenly to include killer mermaids, no really, you're fine with the flu and the disjointed chapters and Mira explaining everything in excruciating detail except for the parts she wants to use as a cliffhanger later on. And you know this, but you keep reading pretending you haven't realized that this is a short prelude to another series you can only hope will not resemble the tragedy that was the parasitology series, and you like Mira cause she's awesome and a cool nerd and writes nice gore and is an all-around rad feminist lady and her cats are the cutest and her patreon and twitter posts give you life so...so you try.

Well I tried. Thank you, I don't want a cookie, I want a new installment in the killer mermaid series pretty please I promise I'll stop shitposting on goodreads please just no more cray-cray science ladies and buttholes please.
( )

Had she been older than eight, she might have understood that the kind of unwell she was feeling wasn’t normal, wasn’t sunstroke, wasn’t something she should hide. Had she been younger than eight, she might have gone whining to her mother before she realized that she ran the risk of cancelling the day’s adventure. Had she been any other age, she would still have died, but she might not have taken quite so many people with her.

Let me say this up front before I start pondering things: This is a lot of fun. (People dropping dead all over the place and science wrecking the earth kind of fun.) I super enjoyed it. Four stars loved it rollicking good read. (With a huge content warning for on screen child death.) I want to get that out there because this book also gives me a lot of thinky thoughts that I want to unpack a bit and it might sound like I don't absolutely love it. I do love it.

Do I wish I had gotten this read before Covid? I'm not sure. On the one hand, my mind cannot stop making comparisons; parts of this book are much more believable than they would have felt to me before, but other parts much less so. (Not that Covid-19 has been anything like Morris Disease would be, with its soon to be 3 million deaths against Morris' 30 million in the opening salvo.) On the other hand, I know I hated "Laughter at the Academy" pretty much on sight (the story, not the anthology, which might be perhaps be the glimmer of this longer tale), but I really enjoyed this. Dr. Gauley has the presence and the pathos to make this work, and I would have gladly stayed with her for a longer story. I do wish this had been longer. The science is complicated and the politics are complicated and the consequences are complicated, and the author does her best to cram it all into this scant hundred pages. The ending scores a solid hit, but with more room to breathe it would have been an absolute devastation. (Do I like my books to devastate me? Yes, yes I do.) The politics here are much more fascinating than they appear at first glance due spoilery things I shall not mention, and I wish they had had a whole novel to unfold in because I think a lot of the preachy feeling would have vanished if there had been, again, room to breathe. (I hope Covid has made plain to everyone that you can't really talk about nations' responses to deadly pandemics without addressing the political aspects, but who knows.) That said, I am endlessly grateful to Subterranean Press for continuing to give Mira Grant an outlet for her fictions, since it's obvious that Orbit isn't really giving her the support she deserves, and if the shortened form is part and parcel of that deal, well OK then.

The one thing I will say, that is a your mileage may vary thing, but which I think is fair as a reader, is that I do sometimes wish Grant/McGuire's omniscient narrator voice were not quite so inclined to jump to conclusions. The tendency to make deus ex machina moral pronouncements on the events as they unfold is a narrative tic I could really do without. So also the tendency to use children's thoughts in the same way. Not because I object to my authors having politics in the least (whether I share them or no) or because I disagree (I agree so hard in this particular case), but because they break the suspension of disbelief immediately and totally. Here I am, trying to get into the opening pages of a book and suddenly I have to deal with eight year olds who have opinions on the antivax movement because of their flu shots? I'm getting old and it's been a while, but my peers and I did not have such discussions, and I was the kind of kid who got into arguments about presidential elections on the playground at that age. Sometimes I just want to sit my author down and say (gently, lovingly) "your experiences are not universal." Beyond that, the story does the work. This story absolutely does the work. There's no reason for the chiding. This probably wouldn't be so heavily on my mind if I hadn't read pretty much all of her novellas in the last two weeks. So maybe it's just me. (Thanks for letting me vent, Goodreads!)

Anyway. Good book. Ignore my ranting. If you like medical thrillers or apocalyptic fiction or medical thrillers that are apocalyptic fiction, you will love it. As always with Grant's Subterranean Press books, hard copies are now unobtainium, but the ebook is available and well worth getting hold of. ( )

Story (4/5): The story is mainly about Dr. Isabella Gauley and her action to form a community secluded from the rest of the world in the midst of a pandemic that annihilates people’s immune systems. This was well written and eerie to read given that it was written before the COVID pandemic. Some things in here are strangely similar to what we are going through now. However, given what we have been going through there were some things in the book that were also strangely overlooked ...however...hindsight is 20/20 and all that (pun intended). I think my biggest complaint is the end of the book, I saw the huge twist coming and thought it was fairly predictable. My issue with this twist (aside from the predictability) is that I don't think our main protagonist's motivations were well explained and they just didn't quite make sense.

Characters (4/5): Dr. Isabella is a character that is interesting and complex. She is the primary character in the book; although we do get to spend a bit of time with Patent Zero’s mother as well. You can tell Isabella isn’t afraid to venture into grey areas right from the beginning, while I never really engaged with her character she was interesting enough and had some intriguing complexity to her.

Setting (4/5): This book is set in the near future. A lot of the book takes place in Dr. Gauley’s clinic and in the sanctuary she sets up. It’s a world that is eerily similar to our own in this COVID-19 pandemic (there is a mention of distance learning for kids, etc). Although I couldn’t help thinking “why aren’t people social distancing!!!” and “where are their masks!!” throughout. While it is not an incredibly novel setting it is an intriguing imagination of what things could be like if this happened, and the situations are different enough from our current pandemic to be intriguing.

Writing Style (4/5): This book is well written and easy to read. I whipped through it quickly and never got bored. I do think it was a bit predictable and thought there were some major holes in how this pandemic was dealt with. However, that may be my current more pandemic-saavy self speaking rather than my past more pandemic-innocent self.

My Summary (4/5): Overall I enjoyed this and am kind of glad I read it, I think I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't read it in the middle of a pandemic. The twist at the end was a bit out of left field and despite that still kind of predictable. If you are looking for a fun, short, pandemic thriller with a twist at the end I would recommend. If you’ve had enough of pandemics to last a lifetime I might skip this. ( )