and one she joins up with people and a boyyyyyy and some love quadrangle and some betrayal and danger and confusing fight scenes and a villain that - whaaaat? i just stopped caring. (oh, and her yearbook, which was never really explained properly for me, considering she was a wallflower loner type) but that aside, the early survival stuff is great. no one ever has a survival manual in these books, and it is great that this character thought of this as she was looting. like nell!!!! my favorite part of this is that she has this survival manual she snatched from the floor of a looted bookstore (maybe my bookstore!!!), from which she is desperately trying to turn a stubborn turtle into food. she is more like this troll creature, crouching warily and snatching for food. she is living alone in central park in a shelter she built herself, struggling with the day-to-day necessities of survival (including tsunami-avoidance), dirty and stinky and wounded and not at all the way the front cover would have you believe. her family have all died from the virulent strain of smallpox that wiped out most of the world. this one is grouped in my mind with the susan beth pfeffer last survivors trilogy, which means it is conceptually strong, but is unrealistic in its portrayal of human response. and there are some good ones and there are some bad ones. i'm not even hiding in the shadows about it anymore. Hi, have we just met? if so, let me tell you that i love large-scale survival stories and i love teen dystopian novels.

This book had a lot of potential, but ultimately it just didn't win me over.

Ashes, Ashes by Jo Treggiari