Let's talk about The Only Light Left Burning

 

So today I’m talking about The Only Light Left Burning by Erik J Brown, which is the sequel to All That’s Left in the World.

For a little bit of lore on me, I loved the prequel to this book so much so to the point that in November of 2023, I was going to this k-pop event called Korea on Stage, and then just before I booked my hotel and trains for the event down to London I saw that Erik J Brown was doing a book event the night before Korea on Stage, so I ended up extending my stay in London an extra night so that I could go to this event. All of this culminated in the fact that now I have two copies of All That’s Left in the World, one of which is signed, all because I completely forgot to bring my copy with me down to London, and that I had the chance to chat with Brown for a bit.

Anyway, the blurb says that Andrew and Jamie once saved each other. But their future together is uncertain. After a dangerous journey through a ravaged world, Andrew and Jamie finally found a community. More in love than ever, they begin to build a new life. But it soon becomes clear they want different things: Jamie is ready to move on and take to the road, just the two of them. Andrew wants to stay put and make a home among friends. With a storm brewing up the coast, they are forced back into the wilderness, where old enemies roam, and they don’t know who to trust. Can they find their way back to safety… and each other?

I will say, I didn’t re-read the prequel to this prior to actually starting to read this one. That may well have been a mistake on my end, but I do remember the two main characters travelling and ending up in a little town or settlement in Florida at the end of the first book.

Chapter one opens on Jamie on a boat, thinking about how badly he misses music. I feel like I’d just die in the apocalypse, because my Spotify Wrapped really shows me worrying numbers when it comes to how much music I listen to, so if I ended up in the apocalypse, I think I’d just collapse without music. Anyway, Andrew got kicked off this boat crew, and Jamie said he didn’t want to be on the boat if Andrew wasn’t, then they had a massive argument, because Andrew thought he was just willing to give up on their mission, but Jamie thought he was minimising his fears because Jamie didn’t want to be away from Andrew for seven weeks. Then at the end of the chapter, we find out a hurricane is coming their way – not exactly ideal in the apocalypse. We pop over to Andrew, who’s, instead of being on the boat, now basically a babysitter to the thirteen kids in their settlement. His chapter seems a lot less action packed and more focused on the argument and issues that he and Jamie are having. It’s so many levels of uncomfortable for the two of them that I loved to read (in a good way). They’re obviously stuck bunkering down, meanwhile having these problems and realising that they each want different things.

The wild thing ends up being that in this book the hurricane and the two of them wanting different things gets focused on more just in the opening of the book. Okay, not the second part, but the hurricane sort of just comes and goes as this, and excuse the pun, apocalyptic wave. It comes, tears through their settlement and they’re then forced to leave because the weather of all things has ruined things for them. But I will say, that is one thing I was thinking about with the first book: they settle in the Florida Keys, which is just this tiny strip of islands that are all connected to Southern Florida. And I knew Florida already got hurricanes, so of course something like a hurricane would hit this settlement.

Andrew gets his arm almost torn off by an alligator at one point. That was fully buck wild. Like, I’ve been to Florida, and I’ve seen gators there, and conceptually, I know they’re dangerous and obviously, given the chance, they would eat people, but just seeing on page Andrew getting attacked and having a limb almost torn off was wild. And I don’t know personally because I’ve luckily never experienced a gator attack, but I would have thought, especially in the apocalypse, that maybe getting your arm mangled and almost torn off would have been a death sentence.

I was a big fan of seeing things pop up in this book that would pop up in any normal setting romance book. I’m not going to spoil anything, since this book is semi-new as I’m writing this, but there were points where Jamie would learn information about the Fort Caroline, who they ran from in the prequel book, and how they felt about him, and he would then keep this information from Andrew for one reason or another. The main one was obviously wanting to protect Andrew, or not make things worse for him. Obviously, he’s going through it with his arm nearly being torn off, but when a certain character dies, Jamie chooses to withhold more as, obviously, he doesn’t want to dogpile bad things on Andrew. It’s one of those things where you want to gnaw on your desk because you know the smart thing to do would be to talk about these bad things, but you also get it, because you understand why he’s not saying anything.

I have also done that very thing where I don’t actually finish writing all of my notes before moving onto another book. I’ll be honest, for this post, it’s been two books, so I’m going to try my best to finish this post to the best of my ability, even if I do think it’ll end up being shorter than my normal ones by a couple hundred words.

Something I really appreciated in this book was that you see the kids being forced to grow up. I know that conceptually kids being forced to grow up faster than they need to isn’t a good thing. But I think in the apocalypse it’s a good thing. Because there was this one girl, Taylor, who I believe she was thirteen in this book, and she was the oldest of all the kids in the entourage of characters, if you ignore Andrew and Jamie, so she got herself to thinking that she wanted to be involved in some of the more adult conversations, just because she was old enough to understand the bad things that were going on. I think there was a good balance with her of being mature for a thirteen-year-old, but also still being a thirteen-year-old when she got a love interest. Her whole romance arc was very much what you would expect for someone of thirteen.

And now since I’ve left this post too long, I think this is my ending point. I definitely enjoyed this book, and it very much gave me Fallout and The Last of Us vibes which I’m a big fan of, despite having never played or watched The Last of Us.

Okay, bye!