The New Dark by Lorraine ThomsonMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
[Disclaimer: I received a free e-copy of this book from NetGalley for review purposes.]
I don't want to write a lengthy review on this, because there isn't much to say. I will say that I've read this story before, by many other authors, and most of them were done better. It doesn't bring anything new to the table, but rather feels like a mish-mash of a bunch of other post-apocalyptic books I've read over the last few years. What really got me was the religious cult in Ulbroom, and how similar it felt to the Mormons in The Book of the Unnamed Midwife.
I couldn't really understand the motivations of most of the characters. I couldn't understand why the mutants were killed at birth, other than because they're mutants. If Einstein is a good mutant, couldn't you raise a mutant to be a good kid just like any other kid? It wasn't explained at all. The plot is not that original, and there's a LOT of crossing-paths-unseen missing of two people who are looking for each other, and are in the same place at the same time but never meet up. And then we get to the end, where this group wants Sorrell to help them start a revolution, all because she has a stupid birthmark on her wrist that matches a poster in an old tube station. None of it makes any sense.
Lastly, there were a lot of wrong words and misspellings. At first I thought that it was a translation error, because they happened so frequently and stood out so much. I noticed when I started that there was a German edition and a German publisher, but now that I see the author is from Scotland, it doesn't make more sense to me. Oh well.
Frankly, there are better books out there that tell a very similar story. I recommend The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, for one (although this is YA, and Unnamed Midwife is definitely adult). It's not a similar story, but it's better post-apocalyptic literature, and I think it tackles a lot of the same issues much more thoroughly.
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