November 2nd

Do you ever just lay in bed and plan your moves for the day?  Like, I am going to wear this and this is where I can locate every piece of clothing I intend to wear and I plan on doing this for lunch and this is what I need to do to make it happen?  Only me?  Okay, fine then.


So today, I woke up and decided I wanted to review a few books I had recently read.  That's what you get...

Bird Box

By Josh Malerman

Malorie survived when most didn’t.  She’s kept two children alive, when most are dead.  She’s done this by not opening her eyes.  The evil is out there and if you look at it, you will become evil and kill others and yourself.  There is no escaping this evil except to keep your eyes closed.

The book flips back and forth from present to past.  Malorie finds out she is pregnant the same day the killings began.  They began in Russia and made their way across the world.  Malorie was living with her sister until it came into their home.  Malorie fled to the safe home she had read about in the newspaper.  She drove slowly but surely navigating herself to a place that would house her for the next five years.

The next five years she lives in a home.  This is the only thing she sees.  When venturing outside, one must be blindfolded.  She learns to rely on her sense of hearing.  Hearing is what saves her.

She was not alone in the house in the beginning.  She had a fellow group of survivors.  In the present, she is by herself with The Girl and The Boy.  She has taught them how to survive.  She has taught them that their sense of hearing will get them to the safe place.  Out of the confines of the home in which they have never left.

They take the river.  Blindfolded.  Only relying on their hearing.

What is it?  Is it a man, is it an animal?  Is it some sort of monster?  Do we ever find out?

I would say, read this.  Post-apocalyptic novel at its best.

Also, you will never guess what the Bird Box actually is.

Above

By Isla Morley

Setting: Eudora, Kansas, who knows what year, I can't quite figure it out because some of the things Blythe says and does and wears are just not consistent with the same time period.  Sometimes she talks like we are back in the day and other times like it's pretty close to modern times. 

Blythe gets kidnapped.  By the school librarian.  Dobbs.  He is a survivalist and just happens to have a missile silo in Eudora.

He locks Blythe away.  For seventeen years.  Blythe spends the first few years desperately trying to get out.  She gets pregnant.  Twice.  One survives.  He kidnaps a boy for her in between.  We don't know what happens to him until the second part of the book.

Blythe's main goal is to survive with her son, Adam, in the missile silo.  Dodds moves down with them around the time Adam is born.  Adam grows restless when he is fifteen.  He doesn't understand why Blythe doesn't get them out of there.  Times are troubled down below.  One day they do escape.  It is not the world Blythe left.

Then the book gets really boring.  I actually skipped a couple of chapters because I was bored out of my mind.

It reminds me of 10 Cloverfield Lane.  Something had gone wrong with the world, but she didn't believe her captor, until it was too late.

Everything ended up okay.  Her social relations sucked.  She didn't see things coming that she should have.  Adam is how you would expect a kid that's lived underground his whole life to act.

I enjoyed the beginning of the book.  I did not enjoy the end.  It had so much potential and could have been so much better. 

Have you read it?  What did you think?

What books have you read lately?  Obviously, I am into the post-apocalyptic types.  Give me a few titles to check out.