Not Alone

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The situation is scary as I could really see this happening to us, (although not AS crazy and bad), it hits close to home for sure. 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 is not a book to go into for an uplifting story; there isn’t much happiness along the way, there is distrust, and peril, and violence and despair… this is the truest kind of apocalyptic future, and it’s grim.

During the first months after the storm, Katie ventured out to find Jack, the man she had been due to marry in a few months. And although it feels as if there’s nothing left to live for and your heart may shatter a bit along the way - there’s still so much hope for a better kinder future for these characters. Very much a survival story, the world Jackson has created is as brutal as they come; it has become a harsh, almost uninhabitable place, and the hardships our two main characters face make this novel feel almost overwhelmingly bleak. Katie is a "mama bear" in the most extreme circumstances imaginable, with her fierce love for Harry and desire to protect him motivating every risky, impossible choice she has to make. Book tackles mental health head on and it does a pretty good job portraying depression, suicidal ideation and PTSD.There is very little hope in this story to make you want to keep going with the characters but the arc of the main character was interesting. Five years later, a stranger by the name of Sim appears out of the rain trying to escape a pack of wild dogs. The novel starts off with a murder, and with seven people trapped on an isolated Greek island lashed by a "wild, unpredictable Greek wind.

After having a few scares and finding an old note from Jack, she realizes he could still be alive and out there somewhere. He tells her of other survivors, especially in cities, and talks about getting a greenhouse working. So she goes off and drags her kid through all these dangers and hazards where she might die and leave him alone at any time. Climate change has been the focal point of environmental concerns with the threat of rising seas, flooding, droughts, and food shortages attributed to it.Not Alone is the story of the harrowing journey of a mother and son, fighting for survival and a future, in a world ravaged by environmental disaster. After a microplastic storm devastates the world and leaves Katie and her five-year-old son Harry as two of the few survivors in England, they must learn to live in isolation. With pollution a major concern, this made the story feel more believable and made it more of an uneasy read.

The plot is recycled garbage and the characters are not compelling enough to be considered a “character driven” story. The narrator, soon established as Elliot Chase, then zooms out to address the reader directly, introducing the players—most importantly movie star Lana Farrar. The land they travel is rife with “dread brown grass and leafless dying trees, everything withering and winking out, brown and black, the sky an unsettling thick grey haze that blocks the sun . Bodies continue to build up around them, inescapable layers of toxic dust hang heavily in the air and Katie is only getting sicker. Not Alone is a meditative post-apocalyptic novel about motherhood, sacrifice, resilience, and the irreversible impacts of environmental ignorance and inaction.The toxicity of plastic dust is probably something we should worry about, although perhaps for now, a bit less than Katie does. She painted a very descriptive picture of the changing world and landscape but I think being American, some of it was so foreign that it didn’t always make sense. I found Harry such a fascinating character to read, his perspective so ill informed, so uneducated and lacking in experience of the outside world. In the present, Katie worries about plastic dust particles, toxic rainstorms, and encountering other people who might have survived. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.

The bond between Katie and Harry was beautiful to read, and you could really tell how much they loved each other, how Katie would do anything for Harry, and in turn how he also looked after her despite his very young age. Katie keeps them alive by foraging for food, adhering to strict decontamination procedures, and avoiding contact with the outside world as much as possible. Five years after a toxic micro-plastic storm all but wiped out humanity, Katie, and her young son, Harry, live in isolation. Years after a mocroplastic mega storm killed much of the population, we meet Katie, surviving in an apartment with her son Harry, who has never known a world other than the current state it is in. We learn a lot about who Katie is and her relationship to Jack and Harry before there is much momentum to the plot.She decides to take Harry from all he’s ever known and go on a journey to attempt to find Jack and make a better life for Harry. They are constantly on the brink of starvation and so much of humanity has died that Western civilization has largely collapsed.