| Title: | Aftertime | |
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| Author: | Sophie Littlefield | |
| Publication Date: | February 2011 | |
| Publisher's Description | THE WORLD'S GONE. WORSE, SO IS HER DAUGHTER. Awakening in a bleak landscape as scarred as her body, Cass Dollar vaguely recalls surviving something terrible. Wearing unfamiliar clothes and having no idea how many days—or weeks—have passed, she slowly realizes the horrifying truth: Ruthie has vanished. And with her, nearly all of civilization. Where once-lush hills carried cars and commerce, the roads today see only cannibalistic Beaters—people turned hungry for human flesh by a government experiment gone wrong. In a broken, barren California, Cass will undergo a harrowing quest to get her Ruthie back. Few people trust an outsider, let alone a woman who became a zombie and somehow turned back, but she finds help from an enigmatic outlaw, Smoke. Smoke is her savior, and her safety. For the Beaters are out there. And the humans grip at survival with their trigger fingers. Especially when they learn that she and Ruthie have become the most feared, and desired, of weapons in a brave new world.... |
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| My rating: | ****.5 | |
Yet another zombie book, but not a typical one. This book, maybe more than the other zombie books I’ve read lately (Allison Hewitt is Trapped, and Mira Grant’s Deadline books), focused on what happened to/in the world after the zombies came (which is one of the rebirths to which the title refers). In this world, the zombification of people came as a direct result of biological warfare, waged against the United States by an unspecified enemy that lost a ground war to the US. Zombies are the the WHY of what took place this novel, not the what itself. This novel was about what happened when California begins to remake itself after a zombie outbreak.
The main character, Cass, was a recovering drug addict who was attacked by zombies, briefly became a zombie herself, and then spontaneously recovered. This made sense in the context of the novel, and also served to give us something that is missing from a lot of other zombie books: hope for those who remain. Even though the book made it clear that “outliers” were not even close to common (one figure offered was at 1 in 1,000, but there’s no way to know if this estimate was supposed to be correct), this glimmer of light in an otherwise dark world worked to give the characters in this story something to believe in. If some people were able to be cured, why not everybody?
Cass wasn’t interested in her outlier status, except for what it could bring her: hope of being reunited with Ruthie, her young daughter, who she lost when she was briefly a zombie (or beater, in the parlance of this world). Cass met up with Smoke, a man who, for his own reasons, was willing to assist her, and headed toward the religious colony where her daughter had been sent.
The Convent was full of some seriously mess-up people, but it’s tough to believe that our world wouldn’t split into similar or crazier factions in the face of such circumstances. The small world feeling of this novel made sense in the context of a society where large numbers of people had recently died, and the sense of urgency of the novel made it hard to put down.
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