A Literary Prose of a Book

2.5 out of 5 stars

I wanted to like this book, I really did.  The story itself and the description really sucked me in. I love a good apocalyptic world. I don’t even mind a little pre-apocalyptic world building but this was missing both of those.  I wouldn’t have grabbed the book had it not described a pretty cool sounding post-apocalyptic world.  But I think there is more world-building in the synopsis than there is in the actual book.

The End We Start From tells the story of London post-flood.  There isn’t much given about what caused the flood and honestly, you can’t even tell that there is a flood (the main character speaks around it a lot but never actually says “the city is flooded”.  She has given birth to a child whom she named Z (we are told the full name once) and she must raise the child in this new world.

I don’t know if it worked on paper and didn’t in audio but the fact that no one had a real name bugged the heck out of me.  Everyone had a letter for a name.  So it was nearly impossible to figure out or even remember what someone’s sex was.  I don’t know if that was done on purpose or not.  I just finished this book and I can’t remember if Z was a boy or a girl – or if it was ever even mentioned.

Second, the book was beautifully written. I believe that this is borderline poetry and definitely a literary fiction piece.  Apparently, I don’t like this writing style as much as I expected.  It was one of those really interesting types of book that you could pull a ton of neat quotes from but didn’t work at the moment.  The new mom would spout these randomly beautiful sayings out and then just talk about how Z was sucking her breasts dry. Such a weird and hard to describe dichotomy.

Overall, I can see how people would like this The End We Start From, but sadly I was not one of them.  It was an interesting storyline and could have been done in such a unique and interesting way but it fell pretty short for me.

Book Description:

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter
Narrator: Louise Brealey
Length: 2 hrs and 2 mins
Published by Blackstone Audio on November 17th 2017
Genres: Dystopian

About the Author:

Megan Hunter was born in Manchester in 1984, and now lives in Cambridge with her young family. She has a BA in English Literature from Sussex University, and an MPhil in English Literature: Criticism and Culture from Jesus College, Cambridge. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and she was a finalist for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award with her short story ‘Selfing’.

Brian
Latest posts by Brian (see all)

Related Posts

Leave a Reply