When the power goes out and stays out, Arden and her best friend John decide to leave their apartment in New York and travel to his parents’ cabin near the Canadian border. When they are attacked by vagrants on their way, they are saved by John’s older brother Gabriel. At the cabin, Arden learns that John’s parents are missing and while they have a stockpile of food, no one knows what is happening or if the power will ever come back on. They have no contact with the outside world and Arden has no way to get in touch with her parents, who are in California, to see if they are even alive. Plus there is the added diversion of Gabriel who although comes across as a controlling jerk, Arden starts to see him in a different light and realizes there is a thin line between love and hate.
I really enjoyed the first chapter of this book. There is suspense and action as Arden and John are attacked by the vagrants and Gabriel comes to save them. But that’s about it. We are just thrown into the middle of the story, which I was not expecting and found a bit jarring. We don’t know why Arden and John have been attacked or why they are on foot in the middle of the woods.
The rest of the book was a bit of a disappointment. First off, the book is less than 300 pages which in my opinion, is a bit short. If there were 100 more pages that contained more plot, I would have loved that. Because honestly, I felt that there wasn’t much plot here. The book starts when Arden and John had already made the trek and are almost at John’s parents’ cabin. I would have liked to read about what happened in New York when the power went out and everything leading up to them leaving their apartment. Instead, we only get a couple of sentences here and there about how there was looting and there was no food. I felt like we missed the bulk of the action.
And I guess that’s what I was expecting with an apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic book – action. There was not a lot of action. This book is mainly about four people in a cabin, which I guess is a different kind of action? It is more about the relationships of people who are hiding out in a cabin rather than what is going on in the outside world. We see Arden, John, Gabriel, and Maggie (John and Gabriel’s younger sister) figuring out what to eat and how to occupy their time while they are waiting at the cabin. If that is what you want to read about, then you will love this book!
This book is the first in a trilogy. The other two books follow John and Maggie as they try to find their own way in this post-apocalyptic world. I think you do find out what caused the power outage in John’s book so if you want to find out the cause you might want to read the next book in the series.
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