⭐⭐⭐⭐¾
Fable For The End Of The World
By Ava Reid
“It was easy once I understood that it was the girl’s life or mine. Survival is the most natural thing in the world, as natural as breathing. Stripped down to its essence, any creature will choose to save itself. Even if it means stealing the breath from another.
The next girl, whoever she is, will be no different.”
🌊❄️🔥
This book sent me through the full range of human emotion.
How do I talk about it without spoiling it?!?! Set in a dystopian future, where Earth has become so toxic you can’t even drink rainwater, this story follows Inesa, a young taxidermist working to keep her family afloat.
She is selected for a Gauntlet — a cutthroat, televised event where one human is hunted by a once-human, but harshly genetically modified, “Angel.”
Melinoë, the Angel assigned to Inesa, is the best of the best. She is a weapon, equipped with night vision, a life of harsh training and surgeries, and stripped of nearly all human emotion.
The Gauntlet quickly goes awry, and the stakes are higher than ever with Zombie-like, former human predators, toxic rivers, and a complete lack of food or drinking water. The two enemies soon realize they must become reluctant allies — at least until the cameras are back on.
The girls learn about each others’ lives, slowly, as they fight to stay alive and understand each other’s worlds.
Worth a mention, when I said Earth is toxic? Due to radiation, the animals have all mutated, most growing gills, webbed feet, and more to better survive the ever rising water levels. People boat from place to place, buy sani-tabs so they can drink safe water, and can’t even grow food. They live in such severe poverty and rely so heavily on the government that they will nominate their own family members into the Gauntlet to pay off their accruing debts.
This story is a devastating example of climate fiction with a haunting love story, the most fascinating worldbuilding, a tyrannical government, human experimentation, and corporate greed so intense that desperate people sell their own family members to a TV reality show, most likely to be killed.
With vibes like a sapphic mix of The Hunger Games, Black Mirror, Uglies, and our real life climate crisis, this YA dystopian novel might make you want to throw it across the room, but in my opinion that’s the absolute best kind.
⭐⭐⭐⭐¾
The Midnight Review 