I cannot mourn for what I have not known.
This was a bleak but stimulating look at a potential dystopian future (similar to The Handmaid’s Tale, but much stranger and more disquieting).
I told myself that I’d been hypocritical and, since I had no one to lie to, I discovered that you can lie to yourself, which felt very strange
Groups of forty people (all men or all women) are caged together in bunkers all across the planet. One day an alarm sounds and all the guards run, never to be seen again. Our main character and her fellow prisoners are lucky enough to be in the cage that a guard was in the middle of unlocking when the alarm began to wail. The women don’t know where they are (is it even planet Earth?), where everyone else is, or why they were kept caged for years in the first place. They venture out into the desolate world and find ways to survive for the remainders of their lives. Since the MC is the only one who was a child when their incarceration began, she not only does not remember “normal” life before their imprisonment, she also is very aware that some day she will be the only person left alive.
I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence.
I just wish we got a little more of a hint at some answers about what actually happened to lead to things being the way they are. Beyond “it’s maybe not Earth”, the answers are completely left to the reader’s imagination.
Jessica Crawford 