After the Flood @kassandra_m7 @WmMorrowBooks #apocalyptic #motherdaughter #searising #future #fictionfriends #duoreviews @JanBelisle @absltmom

The duo team of Jan and I decided to try something totally different. We embarked on a journey into our perhaps future and found that life was not what it had once been as the characters within this book battle the rising sea, the lack of land, and all things associated with the end of what we once knew.

“I am not the shards of a broken glass, but the water let loose from it. The uncontainable thing that will not shatter and stay broken.”

Jan’s review

In this remarkable debut, most of the earth is covered by water after  years of devastating flooding. Livable land is minimal and raider ships, along with breeding ships, are a constant danger. Civilization has collapsed and there are no basic amenities. Myra and her daughter Pearl survive by fishing and trading for basic necessities. When Myra hears her older daughter, Row, who was taken from her 7 years ago, was seen alive in a northern community, they leave on a dangerous journey by sea to search for her. After running into trouble, Myra combines forces with the crew of a larger ship, and she will stop at nothing in order to find her daughter, regardless of the danger or consequences. 

This is an adventure tale of survival I won’t soon forget. The world building was well-crafted and the image of this new world was terrifying.  Yet this book is so much more than a survival  story. It’s a story of survival, but also a story about grief and holding onto hope against all the odds. It’s about strength of character and sacrificing for those you love. It’s about opening up and trusting people when your life normally depends on the mistrust of people.  

I did enjoy this story but it is a bleak one and is overly long with some repetitiveness.  This novel will appeal to those who don’t require their characters to be likable. There are moral ambiguities and I was left with much to ponder after I turned the last page. 

Marialyce and I deviated from our usual genres with this post-apocalyptic book and we found there was much to discuss.

Marialyce’s review

How far would you go to save the life a child who perhaps was dead, while risking the life of your other child? That is the burning question written about in this story.

It’s a hundred years into the future and the seas have risen due to an abundance of rain and what one may assume the melting of the ice caps, and life is reduced to bits of land that rise from the deluge. Control of the waters that many travel upon, is left to pirates, maunders, breeding ships, and pirate like raider ships.

Myra and her daughter Pearl are battling against the things that make this new world dangerous and treacherous. Myra’s older daughter has been taken by her father, to a place where perhaps safety exists, but in his zeal to save himself he leaves a pregnant wife and an unborn daughter, Pearl. These two must make their way in a world that is dangerous, unforgiving, and deceptive.

As these two travel desperately seeking Myra’s lost child, they encounter the various people who populate this future world. The good, the bad, and the ugly are included in this book as they too, search for safety, a nirvana, where they can rebuild what perhaps once was.

There are questions evoked in the story. How far would a parent go to find a child, one who may or may not be dead while sacrificing perhaps the life of a child who survives? Can life without the modern day world we all knew ever return, or is it doomed to extinction? Does lies, deceit, and duplicity make one a better person achieving one’s goals, or do those traits make one as bad as the people one tries to escape from?

For those who enjoy an apocalyptic setting this books provides a bundle of what ifs. Shades of the movie Waterworld kept drifting through my head while reading. However, the bottom line here is the search for a child who is missing with the background of a scenario none of us ever hopes happens. How far would you go to search for your child?

and here’s the author

Kassandra Montag grew up in rural Nebraska and now lives in Omaha with her husband and two sons. She holds a master’s degree in English Literature and her award-winning poetry and short fiction has appeared in journals and anthologies, including Midwestern Gothic, Nebraska Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Mystery Weekly Magazine. After the Flood, her debut novel, will be published in over a dozen languages and has been optioned for a television series.