Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

River Rats by Caroline Stevermer. I almost always go into books completely blind. I read the summary when deciding if I should get a copy or not, but they sit on my Kindle for years before I read it, so I usually forget all about it. I can't even get clues from the cover, because they're so tiny and black and white. In this case, I'm really glad I went into it without knowing anything.

The story is set after the world ends, with no details in the plot as to how it ended. It was called the Flash, which made me think nuclear war, but there were no effects of radiation, so I thought it had to be something else.

The main characters are a group of young teenagers. They live on and control a riverboat moving up and down the Mississippi river. They deliver mail and sing/play music to trade for the supplies they need.

One day they saw an "old man" (40s or so) being chased. He leaped into the river (which is now poisonous, even one swallow could kill someone). They pulled him out and rescued him. This lead into the book's whole plot, that the adult (named King) was being chased by an evil family for knowledge he had.

There were many things about the book I enjoyed. Though it was a YA book, there was a whole layer of detail that kids wouldn't pick up on (the family chasing King would have kidnapped and raped the teenage girl crew member if they could have, but the details about that were really subtle so young readers would miss it).

Unfortunately he book had a bunch of issues. From small ones (like editing issues, random italics here and there, a bunch of random single quote marks and commas just sprinkled through the text) to much bigger ones.

The biggest issue was that the teenage crew (only 5? 6? kids) had zero characterization. At most, they had one single trait (the smart one, the girl with a boy's name, the one with choppy hair). Even at the end of the book, I'd see one of the kids' names and have to stop and wonder which one it was.

The biggest personal issue I had with the book is that it would have been so much better if it had been told from King's POV instead of from the kids'. I was just dying for more information about him, more background on him, to know what he had been doing since the world ended, to have seen it all happen through his eyes. I know this is a YA book, and usually I like those, but it would have been such an amazing story if the author had just written it from King's POV instead.

And as for why it was better going into it blind (also, spoiler in the next paragraph:

I had guessed right, the Flash was a nuclear war. Which, once I was done with the book, really annoyed me. If a nuclear war happened maybe 20 years ago, people wouldn't be walking around just perfectly fine.

I really love the cover I linked above, though it's not the one of the version I read. This book was published in 1992, so it's had a bunch of different covers, most of them quite nice. My version is the last one:



Edit: If it sounds like I didn't enjoy the book, I actually did really like it. It just felt like a missed opportunity -- if it had been from King's POV, it would have been even better.

DNF

71) Stowaway by Matt Phillips. When you're not the target audience of a book, you can't criticize it for not being a good match for you. This was the author's first book and self-published. It was way too simple for me to be interested in, but maybe young boys might enjoy it. I assume the main character stowed away on a spaceship, but I didn't get far enough into the story to see.

72) Alien Rain by Ruth Morgan. Usually I DNF books pretty early on, but I got a third of a way through this book before giving up on it. Set on Mars, Earth was too messed up for people to live on anymore. Even though people have been living on Mars for many, many generations, the biggest thing everyone wanted was to go back to Earth. I had a lot of trouble buying that logic; my father's parents brought him to America, and I have zero desire to go live in Germany -- America is what I know, it's my home country. It's possible there could be a difference between moving to another country and moving back to Earth, but the logic just didn't work for me.

Once I realized I didn't care about any of the characters (and their teenage drama) and I wasn't at all curious about the mysteries the plot tried to set up, I DNFed it.