★★★★☆ | Fantasy | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
An interesting book. After you die, you go to a city where you live so long as someone remembers you from the living world. At this city, life seems to go on as it did on Earth. People work, go out to eat, read books, complain about “life”, and all the while seem not to be amazed at this life after death.
Meanwhile, an engineered virus is decimating life on Earth, leaving just one woman, Laura Byrd, alone in a failing research station in Antarctica.
The book cycles between Laura’s struggles to reach any surviving civilization through the ice and storms of winter and the befuddlement of those recently dead people in the afterworld that are all connected to Laura in some way. If she were to die, and there are many ways she almost dies, each of these lingerers would disappear to some other existence or blink out all together.
Themes:
- Connectedness of life. A virus can wipe us out in just a few days. One person may have unknowingly touched many thousands of other people over their lives.
- Mystery and beauty of the afterlife interplayed with the dead who seemingly don’t care.
- Human awfulness toward the environment and each other.
Highlights
Dreaming was easier than screaming, and screaming was easier than worrying, and worrying was easier than crying, which was what she knew she would be reduced to if she didn’t keep a hard eye on herself.
Why was it that everything that had happened to her in the past seemed so clear, but as soon as she turned toward the future, it all went dim and faded to nothing? Was that what it meant to be alive—moving from a brightly lit corridor into a darkened room at every step?
At some point, when you were fourteen or fifteen, before you reached adulthood or knew who you were, you had to determine whether you were going to be the sort of person who held tight to every single thing that passed through your life, no matter how insignificant it was, or the sort of person who set it all adrift. Life was easier on the people who were willing to relax their grip, but she had decided to be the other sort of person, the sort who wouldn’t let go, and she had done her best to live up to that decision.