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MY ⭐️ RATING: 4.75/5
Format: Kindle Whispersync
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Everything that lives hates us…
Beyond the walls of the small village of Mythen Rood lies an unrecognizable landscape. A place where overgrown forests are filled with choker trees and deadly seeds that will kill you where you stand. And if they don’t get you, one of the dangerous shunned men will.
Koli has lived in Mythen Rood his entire life. He believes the first rule of survival is that you don’t venture too far beyond the walls.
He’s wrong.
MY REVIEW
This series has been sitting on my TBR for a bit now, and wasn’t even part of my yearly list of books I want to try to read this year, but something in me just kept telling me to give this a shot. I went into this blind, not knowing anything about out it other than the description. So when I started it and realized it was a story told in first person narrative, I got very excited because I love hearing the main character tell their story to the reader, as if we were right there with them, that’s partly what made me fall in love with The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. In a similar fashion to NotW, this is not a fast-paced, action-packed, thrill-ride, it’s slow and meticulous, Carey wants us to savor every moment of the story, I do feel like the beginning can be a bit overly informative, but it is needed to understand the world that Carey built.
All the characters were fantastic, but there is one that’s introduced later on that I really like the most, aside from Koli. What really sets this apart and makes the story feel a lot more realistic living in a future post apocalyptic Europe is the way Carey decided to write this story. All of the characters speak in a form of broken English, some more broken than others, that is somewhat simple and direct, and tech from the our current time is called by other names that it would actually look more like rather than what it’s actually called. I can see how this could bother some readers, but it really helped suck me in to the story. That and the narration by Theo Solomon, who to me, is what really makes this story feel authentic. The way he gets into the emotions of each character and the voices he chose for them are incredible and is a huge part of what also drew me in. A good narration can make or break a story, and Solomon absolutely made this story.
“I realised something then that I never knowed before, though I’ve proved it many times since. The world isn’t nothing next to the stories we tell ourselves. It bends to any shape we want it to.”
At first when I was reading this, I kept thinking that this was going to be something like Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and I even feel like there are some similarities to one of my favorite post apocalyptic movies, The Book of Eli starring Denzel Washington, but then I noticed that this wasn’t really close to that, and it blew my mind when I realized to see how much The Book of Koli and The Walking Dead had in common, The Walking Dead is about zombies but in particular, it deals with human life among zombies, though zombies are a threat, humans are still the main threat. In The Book of Koli, the story is centered around a post apocalyptic world where nature has come to life and can kill the humans that have survived, in a sense, Carey has turned nature into the zombie in this story, but while nature is a clear and present danger, the humans that survived, are the real threat.
Carey’s world building and prose is something else that really stuck out, the prose in particular. I love when I can go back and see that I ended up saving 15+ lines from the book that stuck out to me for one reason or another. On top of that, Koli’s story is just so captivating and it’s hard not to fall in love with how great he is and feel for him as his story is told. It’s one loss, banishment and finding oneself, it’s truly gripping to listen to his story as he tells you what he’s gone through, the knowledge he’s learned, as well as the new friends and enemies he makes along the way, all while trying to stay out of harms way. This was truly one of those that I went in not sure what to expect, it’s not anything new to the genre, but the story is superb, and I came out extremely happy I decided to make the decision to read it.
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