Reviews and Comments

This isn't the kind of book I normally read. I received it for a secret SantaThing last year & I assumed I wouldn't like it. I might have been "scared" by the "LGBTQA+ -- Fiction" label, thinking it was going to be filled with sex and stuff. There wasn't any of that.

It was published in 2019, but you could have sworn it was written in the height of the 2020 COVID pandemic.

This near future world where due to terrorist attacks and a deadly virus governments have outlawed gatherings >30 people, and many locations less than that. We get two protagonists: Rosemary Laws, a young adult over 24 who hasn't been out in public since she was a little girl & Luce Cannon, a rising rock star before the whole world got shut down after a baseball stadium blows up and it ends up her last show was the last live music show in America ever.

Each story is told in first person, intertwined around each other, not always at the same timeline, but with chapters properly labeled so you don't get lost.

Rosemary gets a new job that is outside of "hoodspace" the proprietary virtual reality that has replaced the open internet, and after trying to get a real job Luce takes her one-hit-wonder royalties and start an underground music venue.

Rosemary ends up ruining Luce's life when trying to improve it. But we do end up with a happy ending, even if one reconciliation I was hoping for did not occur.

A week after finishing this and I still can't quite put my finger on what I liked so much about it. The flashback story to Erika Hernandez seemed a little far-fetched, even for Star Trek. And we see a long time T.V. favorite ship destroyed. Some hints to Janeway having been assimilated, did I miss something somewhere? Yet still it held on to me, kept me up way past bedtime and I anxiously await the arrival of the final in the Star Trek: Destiny trilogy.

I really liked this book. Bryson lived in Britain for like 20 years he moved back to the states and it's strange to hear an American author use words like trousers, privy, etc.

This is not a how-to book. Some have said it's a how-not-to. But it is a well written account of one dude and his overweight friend's attempt at hiking over 2,000 miles.

Bryson puts various points of fact & history throughout the tale, like how the trail came to be, geological history of the mountains, the ineptitude the US government & more.

It was even better than the movie, which I stopped to watch in the middle of listening to the audiobook.

Recommended for everyone.

I'm only in chapter 2 but already surprised how much I'm liking it.

So bad I didn't finish it