And Then I Woke Up

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And Then I Woke Up feels like a difficult title to rate and review, because it was a difficult title to form a solid opinion on. And Then I Woke Up is a zombie story of sorts, but told from the perspective of someone who has been “cured” — and these definitely aren’t your average zombies. In this overly long sequel, Violet, Xaden, and their dragons are determined to find a way to protect Navarre, despite the fact that the army and government hid the truth about these creatures.

When a disease compromises your ability to define reality, differentiating fact from fiction becomes infinitely harder and trust, almost impossible.A sly snake of a narrative that, with wonderful pacing and elegant writing, continuously sheds its skin that revealing ever new realities that weave together and inform each other. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. Speculative fiction’s futuristic and fantastic worlds have always served as a mirror for present-day issues, and this is a fine example of the new wave of stories grappling with our current tumult. This confusion kept me off-kilter for the majority of the novella, and I never really felt like I was on even ground. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson.

It'll be like a purge of the banal, and all the trivia of the world will be the first down the plughole. Which would also be fine, but it pulled me out of the story to wonder if the vagueness of the location was intended as a wink to Australian readers while making the story feel more local to, let's say, Americans, which then derailed my thought process quite a bit from the point the narrator was making.Characters that have gone through unspeakable trauma still show tremendous empathy towards one another, giving a ray of hope to the uncertain future they face.

Where a story like this could focus on action and set pieces, this story gives this main relationship the spotlight, and is all the more original for it. The one Spence ran into was pink from top to bottom—the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the furniture, the curtains. A mind-altering virus puts a stranglehold on the world and the survivors don’t know what to believe or who to trust.The infected may not be who you think, depending on if you are one or not - because this is the zombie apocalypse with a twist, where the real infection has taken hold of those who think themselves survivors. Survivors don’t care—they’re just glad to have more supplies—but the government has done this to keep the survivors happy and contained (without supplies, they become more reckless and therefore more dangerous). Without giving away spoilers, the end of the first chapter took me completely by surprise and made me want to reread what I'd just read and see the signs of what was going on. Through Spence’s experiences, he explores the idea of how powerful stories can be in both good and bad ways, how they shape our perceptions of events.

I'm not sure what you mean exactly, but, the book with a load of hype and ended rubbish was Jodi Picoult's 'My Sisters Keeper'. Malcolm Devlin's stories have appeared in Black Static, Interzone, The Shadow Booth and Shadows and Tall Trees. So my advise is if you want to do it, weave the dream element into the story from the start, drop lots of clues that it's dream, make waking up a goal to be achieved.

There isn’t much to say without running the risk of spoilers, but I was fascinated by the entire premise that Devlin came up with and its social commentary on the way people view and spread information and “truth” in the modern age. It’s not fully understood by those who never experienced it, and it’s an even darker ocean for those “cured” of it. I loved the writing style of the author, the plot was so unique to me, and I felt like the characters were pretty well developed in such a short amount of time. Or is it the side who finally tried to sway the “monster-killers” with isolation, compassion and sanitized news? Two people might see the exact same thing but come away with two different interpretations of what happened.