Tuesday 12 June 2007

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

I think I liked it. Weird right? Defiantly an interesting read to say the least.

The book alternate chapters between 'The City' and Laura Byrd who is alone and stuck in Antarctica. The idea behind The City chapters is that after you die, you end up there. You then stay there until everyone who had ever known you in your life dies, then you move on to whatever the next place was.

One morning, the newspaper man Luka Sims (a resident of The City) wakes up to find everyone there gone. He goes looking through the streets and ends up finding a group of people in the main area of the city, but all the residents that he had known (or most of them anyways) were gone.

Meanwhile, Laura is still on the planet, but she is alone in Antarctica. She went as an employee for Coca-Cola along with two other co-workers to do research on using the melting ice in their product (yes it's a little far fetched). When they can't reach anyone back home, and their compound starts to fall apart they leave to look for help leaving Laura alone. When they don't come back after several weeks, and the compound loses heating ability, Laura heads out alone to look for them.

We soon find out that the reason everyone left The City was a deadly virus had attacked everyone on the planet....everyone except Laura who is alone in the icy wilderness.

I don't know how to rate this book (I went to a 10 point rating system because I was too constricted by the 5 stars). I absolutely loved the idea of the book and the concept of the two worlds and while parts of it were very well written there were other parts that I thought could have been better developed. I'm giving it a 6/10....but I think it's worth the read....and has by far the coolest cover of any book I have read.

1 comment:

Scott said...

Leah-
Another nicely written review. Our tastes are similar which means I'll probably skip this book. When the premise gets WAY out there it takes really good characters go keep me in the game.
DAd