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A century ago, the Sentience Wars tore the galaxy apart and nearly ended the entire concept of intelligent space-faring life. In the aftermath, a curious tradition was invented - something to cheer up everyone who was left and bring the shattered worlds together in the spirit of peace, unity, and understanding. Once every cycle, the civilizations gather for the Metagalactic Grand Prix - part gladiatorial contest, part beauty pageant, part concert extravaganza, and part continuation of the wars of the past.
This omnibus edition contains Survival (book 1) and Humanity (book 2) of the After It Happened series.
Joy has no one. She spends her days working the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune.
In 2157, a mysterious gas known as Variant spreads across the globe, killing or mutating most organic life. The surviving humans take refuge in an underground city, determined to return home. But after generations of failures and botched attempts, hope is beginning to dwindle. That is, until a young scientist makes a unique discovery, and everything changes. Suddenly, there's reason to hope again, and it rests within a group of genetically engineered children that are both human and Variant.
When Micajah Fenton discovers a crater in his front yard with a broken time glider in the bottom and a naked, virtual woman on his lawn, he delays his plans to kill himself. While helping repair the marooned time traveler's glider, Cager realizes it can return him to his past to correct a mistake that had haunted him his entire life. As payment for his help, the virtual creature living in the circuitry of the marooned glider, sends Cager back in time as his 10-year-old self.
Childhood friends Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead didn't expect to see each other again after parting ways under mysterious circumstances during high school. After all, the development of magical powers and the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to alarm one's peers and families. But now they're both adults, living in the hipster mecca San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them.
A century ago, the Sentience Wars tore the galaxy apart and nearly ended the entire concept of intelligent space-faring life. In the aftermath, a curious tradition was invented - something to cheer up everyone who was left and bring the shattered worlds together in the spirit of peace, unity, and understanding. Once every cycle, the civilizations gather for the Metagalactic Grand Prix - part gladiatorial contest, part beauty pageant, part concert extravaganza, and part continuation of the wars of the past.
This omnibus edition contains Survival (book 1) and Humanity (book 2) of the After It Happened series.
Joy has no one. She spends her days working the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune.
In 2157, a mysterious gas known as Variant spreads across the globe, killing or mutating most organic life. The surviving humans take refuge in an underground city, determined to return home. But after generations of failures and botched attempts, hope is beginning to dwindle. That is, until a young scientist makes a unique discovery, and everything changes. Suddenly, there's reason to hope again, and it rests within a group of genetically engineered children that are both human and Variant.
When Micajah Fenton discovers a crater in his front yard with a broken time glider in the bottom and a naked, virtual woman on his lawn, he delays his plans to kill himself. While helping repair the marooned time traveler's glider, Cager realizes it can return him to his past to correct a mistake that had haunted him his entire life. As payment for his help, the virtual creature living in the circuitry of the marooned glider, sends Cager back in time as his 10-year-old self.
Childhood friends Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead didn't expect to see each other again after parting ways under mysterious circumstances during high school. After all, the development of magical powers and the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to alarm one's peers and families. But now they're both adults, living in the hipster mecca San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them.
In a corporate-controlled future where the ruling conglomerates genetically engineer their employees, Millicent Foster is the best of the best. Physically perfect and exceptionally intelligent, Millicent is granted the uncommon privilege of breeding. But her daughter inherits more than superior genetics...little Marie has a rare ability that the world has never seen, and her conglomerate, Moxidone, will stop at nothing to have sole possession of the child.
Set in 1960's London, Funny Girl is a lively account of the adventures of the intrepid young Sophie Straw as she navigates her transformation from provincial ingnue to television starlet amid a constellation of delightful characters. Insightful and humorous, Nick Hornby's latest does what he does best: endears us to a cast of characters who are funny if flawed, and forces us to examine ourselves in the process.
When she fell asleep, the world was doomed. When she awoke, it was dead. In the wake of a fever that decimated the earth's population - killing women and children and making childbirth deadly for the mother and infant - the midwife must pick her way through the bones of the world she once knew to find her place in this dangerous new one. Gone are the pillars of civilization. All that remains is power - and the strong who possess it.
This is the story of mankind clawing for survival, of mankind on the edge. The world outside has grown unkind, the view of it limited, talk of it forbidden. But there are always those who hope, who dream. These are the dangerous people, the residents who infect others with their optimism. Their punishment is simple. They are given the very thing they profess to want: They are allowed outside.
After a long and eventful life, Allan Karlsson ends up in a nursing home, believing it to be his last stop. The only problem is that he's still in good health, and in one day, he turns 100. A big celebration is in the works, but Allan really isn't interested (and he'd like a bit more control over his vodka consumption). So he decides to escape. He climbs out the window in his slippers and embarks on a hilarious and entirely unexpected journey, involving, among other surprises, a suitcase stuffed with cash.
Survival in Man’s Second Dark Age...Three hundred years after the fall of society, the last fragments of civilization are clinging to life, living in the ruins of the ancient cities in nearly-medieval conditions. Technology has been reduced to legend, monsters roam the forests, and fear reigns supreme. But that is just the beginning...The wind-borne spores are spreading, disfiguring men and twisting their minds, turning them into creatures that threaten to destroy the townships.
In the American Southwest, Nevada, Arizona, and California skirmish for dwindling shares of the Colorado River. Into the fray steps Angel Velasquez, detective, leg breaker, assassin, and spy. A Las Vegas water knife, Angel "cuts" water for his boss, Catherine Case, ensuring that her lush, luxurious arcology developments can bloom in the desert, so the rich can stay wet while the poor get nothing but dust.
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality: the black Chinese restaurant.
The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father's caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys' prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city.
Queen Coriane, first wife of King Tiberias, keeps a secret diary - how else can she ensure that no one at the palace will use her thoughts against her? Coriane recounts her heady courtship with the crown prince, the birth of a new prince, Cal, and the potentially deadly challenges that lie ahead for her in royal life.
It's 1944 when the twin sisters arrive at Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood. As part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele's Zoo, the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others, and they find themselves changed, stripped of the personalities they once shared, their identities altered by the burdens of guilt and pain.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. Clarissa visits London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth and makes her wonder about her choice of husband; she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic and demanding Peter Walsh, and she "had not the option" to be with Sally Seton for whom she felt strongly.
In the aftermath of a devastating plague, a fearless young heroine embarks on a dangerous and surprising journey to save her world in this brilliantly inventive thriller.
In the ruins of a future America, 15-year-old Ice Cream Star and her nomadic tribe live off the detritus of a crumbled civilization. Theirs is a world of children; before reaching the age of 20, they all die of a strange disease they call Posies - a plague that has killed for generations. There is no medicine, no treatment; only the mysterious rumor of a cure.
When her brother begins showing signs of the disease, Ice Cream Star sets off on a bold journey to find this cure. Led by a stranger, a captured prisoner named Pasha who becomes her devoted protector and friend, Ice Cream Star plunges into the unknown, risking her freedom and ultimately her life. Traveling hundreds of miles across treacherous, unfamiliar territory, she will experience love, heartbreak, cruelty, terror, and betrayal, fighting to protect the only world she has ever known.
A postapocalyptic literary epic as imaginative as The Passage and as linguistically ambitious as Cloud Atlas, The Country of Ice Cream Star is a breathtaking work from a writer of rare and unconventional talent.
Any additional comments?
I'm a junky for the dystopian/ post apocalyptic genre, so this book seemed right up my alley based on the description alone, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it was so much more than I could have wished for. There is a richness to the world building, the language and the characters that is really beautiful and hard to shake off when you're done. So many of the reviews I read before buying this book had mixed feelings about the use of language in this book, as it's written entirely in an imagined slang that is loosely based on contemporary African American slang, with elements of Spanish and possibly French mixed in. The narration of this book is so on point that by the end of the first chapter it's like listening to well performed Shakespeare, in the sense that even when the words are foreign to your ear none of the means no is lost because the delivery of the lines manages to bring it all together. And by two or three chapters in, the language with all of its new words and rules is perfectly familiar and comfortable to your ears.
The story itself is as heartbreaking as it is exciting, you will find yourself on the kind of emotional roller coaster that a truly epic tale should take you on - the kind that you don't want to get off of. It's real and truthful in its darkest moments, but it's not all doom and gloom. There are characters who will make you laugh just as hard as you might have wanted to cry right before they entered the scene.
Several reviewers have likened it to the hunger games for grown ups, and yes, it appeals to the same kind of person who loves those books. But I don't think that the distinction as "not a YA" book is felt as heavily for the reader as those reviewers want to make you think. Especially if the YA books in the genre are something you enjoy!
7 of 7 people found this review helpful
I absolutely loved this book. The language is incredible. The story wonderful and sad and totally intriguing. The book is spoken is another language, a mix of incredible metaphors as well as a new language to match the world the author created. Really really enjoyed it.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
I am having a really hard time reviewing this audiobook. While the performance was excellent, and the story immersive, I just can not be satisfied. I love a big chunky read/really long listen; coming in at a little over 26 hours though, I don't know that I feel accomplished or better off for my experience. The degradation of language was not a problem for me, it was interesting and easy to fall into... I can't put my finger on it, something just isn't sitting right with me. I am not one who scares easily, no subject is too uncomfortable for me as long as it isn't overly gratuitous, and I'm not squeamish.... I just didn't love this book. I purchased it because of the hype it has received this year, nods from the international book awards etc., but I feel, I don't know, cheated somehow. I listened to it every chance I got, I couldn't get away from it, while simultaneously feeling like I couldn't wait for it to be over, I mostly just anticipated it ending, not particularly caring what the ending was. I'm not typically a person who will read a book just to finish it either; I've given up on several that I felt were a waste of time. Something about it kept me coming back, but I am so happy it's over.... I doubt this will be helpful to you, as I myself am confused by my own review.
I review simply to say, if you haven't committed to the purchase or you aren't picking it up as required (or voted for book club) reading, please pick something else.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
This was a truly imaginative tale that takes a welcome departure from many post-apocalyptic plot lines. The language used throughout the book is that of the main character, and it is one of the most noticeable facets of this gem. Though admittedly, it was a bit challenging to parse at first, patience and attention to context made everything clear after a few chapters. On the whole, the book's peculiar lingo brings the reader wonderfully close to the thoughts and character of the girl known as Ice Cream Star, and in doing so, often succeeds in some beautifully descriptive and poetic expressions. A great deal of credit goes to an absolutely brilliant performance on the part of the narrator.
I appreciated the dark and politically relevant premise, but could do without constant back and forth dialogue.
I just can't get into the speech of this book. I pray that language never deteriorates to the degree of this book.
1 of 3 people found this review helpful