In the After

In the After by Demitria Lunetta
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sometimes combining sci-fi elements works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's just your average pairing. In this case, it's a little of everything.

We begin with Amy, an extremely competent 13-year old who gets orphaned when an alien invasion happens. Her parents were environmentalists and prepared for the worst, so Amy is in good shape when it comes to survival. She quickly learns how to evade both the creatures and other survivors. One day on a trip to scavenge for food, she finds a toddler walking in an aisle. Oddly, the baby is silent. Amy scoops her up and takes her home and they spend years surviving like sisters, speaking only with sign language and keeping each other out of harm's way. About halfway through the story a dystopian element is introduced. It's the typical supposed-to-be-utopia-but-is-up-to-no-good kind of place run by none other than Amy's mother. From there the story becomes all about Amy getting to the truth.

The strength of this book is it's world building. It was easy to see this post-apocalyptic world, Amy's home and then the compound on which she and Baby go to live. I even got a good sense of what the aliens looked like. The atmosphere was very present and even palpable at times. The tension and suspense grabbed me and held. The story never lost a good pace and although somewhat predictable as these sorts of stories go, it held my interest. Lunetta used flashbacks to tell the story and as the past began to meet the present it got better and better. This story was very well told.

As for characters, I have to say that Amy's mother was done extremely well. I hated that woman - she was extremely flawed, selfish, driven - and yet we never ceased to feel some minute degree of sympathy for her. She allows all sorts of bad things to happen to her daughter in the name of the greater good, let her husband die, allowed evil to flourish right under her nose. I would paint her as the villain, even though there was another clear villain.

Baby, while a necessary part of the plot, really never goes beyond being a happy-go-lucky 7 or 8 year old. Rice the boy genius assistant to Amy's mother is nice because although he is clearly the love interest, romance really doesn't play any part in the story. The police force headed by Kay is a good group, balancing out the cast nicely.

So all in all, a great read. On audio the book is narrated by Amanda Dolan. Her voices for the male characters sound a bit like she's making fun of her dad - but then not every female voice actor can do deeper-voiced male characters well. Her voice for Rice was entirely too old and far too similar to her voice for Dr. Reynolds. So as such, she's not an outstanding narrator. But she was good enough.

It will be interesting to see how the story concludes in the sequel. Lunetta is not afraid to go for the gritty, shocking bad stuff. Maybe the producers of The Walking Dead should have a look at this series for their next project.

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