Book #8 of 2022: Any Sign of Life

Any Sign of Life by Rae Carson

I got this book thinking it would be bad. If you watched the TV show Walking Dead, you'll remember the first ep was Rick waking up alone in the hospital. He had been in a coma for days. Everyone was dead. The world was full of zombies.

This book started exactly the same way. Girl gets sick, is in a coma, and when she wakes up, everyone is dead. (Though luckily no zombies.)

So when I saw that, I hadn't expected this book to be anything but a knockoff, but I was happily surprised. And then grumpy.

The first third of the book was REALLY good. The main character (Paige, a teenage girl) had to survive on her own. That's harder than it seems, when every house, store, street, and yard is full of rotting dead bodies. (Still, luckily no zombies.)

Paige has to deal with her family's dead bodies, finding food and shelter, staying warm (midwest in the end of winter), and all that.

Then she found another survivor, a hot teenage boy, and I sighed out loud.

Still, it didn't go downhill yet. I enjoyed reading about how the two were surviving together.

Then they found another survivor. Yet another teenager. A girl. I was expecting a love triangle, but thankfully that never happened.

And then the aliens arrived, and the book took a radical left turn. It became a battle of four teenagers (they picked up another boy along the way) against an alien invasion.

The last two-thirds of the book was so bad and unbelievable. Some parts of the US government knew about the alien invasion, so they made a secret group to deal with it. (This is so unbelievable, I'm annoyed even writing the plot out.) A splinter group of the aliens didn't want to take over the world, so they contacted part of the US government to give them the cure to the plague that was intended to kill off all human life.

That little part of the US government contacted every other government in the world to form a group that would create and decide who gets the vaccine.

You see, because the vaccine is hard to make, they needed multiple multi-billion dollar facilities to create it. And each vaccine costs over one million dollars to make.

So they could only make 7,000 doses of it. And then that group made up of government officials from all over the world actually came to an agreement on who to give it to: All teenagers with "potential to be great".

Yep. The group all agreed to not give it to themselves, their families, children, loved ones.

And all this happened without news of the invasion ever getting out beyond the group.

Sigh.

On top of that, the author had the characters preach to the reader about racial privilege, gender stuff, all that. It was so heavy handed.

If you enjoy "everyone on Earth died" stories, you could pick this one up and read only the first third, but once the aliens show up, toss the book out a window.