Review: Great plot idea that devolves into ordinary romance
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 30, 2014
The plot sounded great: the end of the world as we know it (and NOT due to zombies, vampires or government-sponsored biowarfare). A woman is caught in a city and has to make her way home through hundreds of miles, accompanied by a man with whom she once had a serious relationship. The reason she was in that city: through one of those Romanceland coincidences, she found herself the guardian of her former boyfriend's son...except she didn't know about that relationship until the child's mother died, and had to contact him to take the boy. The book continued well for a while, but gradually gave way under the pressure of traditional romance. Despite the critical situation in which all the characters find themselves, they keep thinking passionately about each other, sometimes kissing fiercely (despite not using a toothbrush in days). The romantic obstacle (why they broke up originally) is never made clear, which is a serious flaw. Another flaw is that the book ends fairly abruptly with so much unresolved that it's no surprise when the author's afterword states that another book will be forthcoming. It would have been much better if this had been a longer book, with the end-of-world scenario better developed, and a full backstory described for the major characters. A fortuitous - but unlikely - issue is that Gemma happens to have a self-sustaining farm, which she bought based on a research paper by one of her students that described an apocalyptic situation. Another issue, which I found particularly odd, is that the book is supposedly set in the USA, but many idioms are distinctly British. I recommend this book for the end-of-the-world storyline, but not as a romance.