All That's Left in the World! That's the title for this post...

 

So, this book, All That’s Left in the World by Erik J. Brown was one of those books that I found out about thanks to Twitter, and it is a part of that era of a pile of books that were and are coming out in March and April – I will say, there are only two more books after this one in that era, however, so we are coming to the end of it.

Now, remember when I complained about how busy The Infinite Noise was. When I complained, it was because it had a bunch of those quotes of praise just busying up the covers. Thankfully this book does the very opposite of that. There is not a single quote of praise on either the front or back cover. The front cover is stunosha (in this dressiana), and the back cover is literally nothing but the blurb, but it’s printed so it looks like it’s on an old sign, and I’m a big fan of that. This is one of those books that if I were to judge it solely by its cover, I’d love it straight up.

But as for the blurbo from my shows, it says that Jamie and Andrew are strangers, and two of the last people left alive. Jamie lives alone in a cabin in the woods after a catastrophic event wipes out most of the population, and he’s learned to fear other desperate survivors. But when he meets the injured Andrew, Jamie is compelled to help. They head out into the world together, and their friendship begins to feel like something more. They’re basically looking for safety, shelter and community, but ahead of them is a perilous journey through a world torn apart. So, we’re looking at a very much Fallout-esque post-apocalyptic kind of gig-o-rama with, I assumed, some homosexuality thrown in there. So, basically me any time I play Fallout 4 since I romance MacCready every single time.

The chapters aren’t numbered, so I’ll just talk about the first handful as they flit between both Jamie (or Jamison as the chapters called him) and Andrew. So, Andrew gets his leg caught in a bear trap and is heading to a cabin, and Jamie is in the cabin that Andrew is walking up to. Then we go back, almost immediately, to Andrew, now with a gun pulled on him, who collapses on the floor. But Jamie doesn’t shoot him, and actually ends up helping him with the wound because his mum worked in a hospital and he’s just a nice boy. We then find out that Andrew’s fibula might be broken! Give it up for his broken fibula! Because of that he’s basically going to be taken out for six weeks, but he mentions to the reader of a date of the last time he’s going to find some people called the Fosters in Alexandria. So, homeboy is on a mission, but he also mentions that the new EU is planning on arriving at an airport, I believe it was, and there was a deadline he needed to make it there for. And then after Andrew has been there for about a week, when Jamie is doing a run to a hardware store, he admits that he doesn’t want Andrew to leave.

So, in the front of the book, there’s this map of the East Coast of the US, and it points out various points mentioned in the book, and given the blurb mentioned they boys are out looking for shelter, I assumed they’d leave Jamie’s cabin at some point, and obviously they do – that’s not a spoiler – but the event that incites them to leave… I’m not going to lie, I know this is a post-apocalypse book, so there’s going to be literal tension, maybe a bit of horror. I was clenched during the event, I won’t lie. I’m not going to say what the event was, for spoilers, but it got me, gal!

And the two keep travelling, obviously, and, this is a really dumb point to make, but even though the apocalypse in this book was somewhat recent for the characters, I still got very much Fallout video game vibes from the book. Definitely more Fallout 4 than New Vegas. Things in New Vegas are scorched, but in 4, there’s plant survival. And that might have something to do with 4 being on the East Coast, and New Vegas being West Coast and Nevada. There’s no real point to this point that I’m making, but it’s just the vibe I got as I read. I will say, it definitely felt like there was some video game logic applied to this book, but honestly? It's set in the apocalypse, I didn’t care. This shit was wild, so I wasn’t mad. I think I know what point I was trying to make after sitting on it for a while. I know there are many fictional apocalypses, but I think my favourite iteration of the apocalypse is Fallout, and this book reminded me of that, so that’s why I liked it.

The thing I’ll say about this book is that, and this might be because of the way I play Fallout, every time Andrew and Jamie stop, for some reason I thought that was going to be it, despite the fact that the map that’s in the front of the book encompasses the entirety of the East Coast, like all the way from New England down to Florida. But to get back to my point, every time they stopped, for some reason my dumb brain was like, “Oh yes, this is where they’re going to stop”. They kept travelling and honestly? If I was in the apocalypse, I would not be able to do the majority of what these sixteen-year-olds did. I’d personally just die.

I will say, there were times in the book where time would jump ahead a few days, sometimes even weeks. Now, I feel like I’d normally have a problem with this in a book, but given that this was post-apocalypse, and that during the book we find out just how deadly the superflu that killed off the majority of the population was, it makes sense, and it works for this book. There are points where it’s mentioned how infrequently Jamie and Andrew see other people, and all they’re doing is travelling, so it makes sense that we’re going to see time skips, and I’m kind of glad they were included, because if they weren’t, this book would be so much longer than necessary, and I think the pacing would have ended up just garbage. Thankfully it didn’t. And with the time jumps, even though we didn’t see it, Jamie and Andrew’s relationship progressed as well, which I liked. I don’t think we missed out by not seeing what the two were doing during the time jumps because, again, I feel like it would be a lot of nothing, honestly.

There’s one line that I’d like to share with everyone. I’m going to give this line with no context and it’s also my favourite line in the entire book. And that line is: “Penis bees be damned.” You’re welcome.

But that’s it, and I believe it was the I’m So (Not) Over You post where I said I hoped that would be the start of a high in terms of what I’m reading. I’m pleased to announce that this book is joining the high. I’m going to say this now, confidently: I’m putting this book in my top books of 2022 list, I really enjoyed it.

Okay, bye!