Wow, this book was really strange. It was one of the oddest dystopian worlds I have read about, but it was also fascinating and pretty interesting!

The Rending and the Nest is an unusual post-apocalyptic novel because it is actually quite utopic and hopeful in its strange near-future setting. It takes place shortly after a mysterious occurrence called the Rending in which much of earth's population - as well as animals, technology and physical objects - disappear. Mira and her group create a community called Zion in which they sort through the junk that has been left behind in order to rebuild. No women have given birth for some time, and when they do finally begin to get pregnant again, they give birth to inanimate objects. This development was quite shocking and ultimately drives the plot of the novel as the women deal with their "babies" and how to treat them within the community.

The plot clearly has logistical flaws, but that just doesn't seem important while reading this character-driven novel. It was so easy to ignore the obvious issues with the pregnancies etc. and focus on how clearly drawn Mira and the other members of her community are. I will be looking forward to whatever Schwehn writes next.

“It wasn’t fire or ice. Wasn’t a virus or global warming or a meteor. Wasn’t an atomic bomb or a tsunami or a sulfurous smelling ape. It was a Rending, a split.”

This book was so weird and in this case, weird is awesome! It felt vaguely familiar as I read and once I hit 25% I realized that was because the plot reminded me of The Leftovers by Tom Perotta. For those that have read The Leftovers, it isn’t the family drama dynamics but the “Rapture-ish” event that takes place in the beginning.

The Rending and The Nest knocked me off my feet from page one. On a random day without any warning, “ninety-five percent of the Earth’s population and the vast majority of the animals, food and goods” vanish. The people and animals left had only “the Piles and later the Babies.” Mira, our main character loses everyone in her family the day of the Rending. The first person she encounters after she wakes up is a mall security guard named Doug (who is a piece of you know what). She is in an H&M store at the mall where she had been shopping with her little brother Bim. The description of what Mira sees after the Rending is what hooked me early on. “I’d woken alone, on the floor of H&M, tucked between rows of cheap jewelry. The displays looked picked over, as though a massive horde of zirconium-hungry locusts had passed through while I took a nap on the tile floor.” Once she looks around a bit more she says “the rest of the store looked like it had suffered a plague as well. Nothing was overturned. Nothing was rumpled or broken. There were no clerks behind the registers. There were no registers.” Mira never explains what happened during her short moments with Doug but says “I knew something terrible had happened and I knew that the man holding my arm was not a good man.” She is shortly after rescued by two other people in the mall Lana and Rodney whom she quickly becomes friends with. They begin a three week journey with a short stay at Ikea (which I loved) along the way to find others and eventually settle and form a society they call Zion. Each day they scavenge through the mountainous Piles that showed up all over the world on the day that everything and most of the population went missing. These Piles hold random items and scavengers like Mira are in charge of finding supplies and necessities for the people in their community within them.

If you think this premise is weird, I assure you it gets weirder. Three years after the Rending, Mira is 20 years old and her friend Lana is pregnant. This is the first pregnancy their group has experienced since the world changed. The community’s doctor tells Mira that something is wrong with her friends pregnancy when after twenty-six weeks pregnant she stills feels no movement. The problem is, without technology they cannot know what that problem is until the baby is born. The day Lana goes into labor, everything in their society changes. Lana gives birth, but not to a human. Nor is it an alien or animal, or anything crazy like that. Even crazier, she gives birth to a doll. An inanimate object. Lana is absolutely beside herself and when these births continue to happen with different objects being “birthed” to each woman, the group is faced with the challenge of determining what to do with “the babies” and need to find out why this is happening.

The Rending and The Nest was such an interesting and unique book. I know it seems like I gave away many more details than I should have, but I’m telling you this book has a TON more details and plot twists than I have written here. I didn’t even mention the infamous Zoo, how the society of Zion works, theories about why the Rending occurred or the mysterious man who appears in their community!

I always think that the craziest stories are the coolest because they came out of someone’s mind. This isn’t anything that’s ever really happened or ever really would, but the author had enough of an idea spark in her mind to create this world and all of its characters. Mira is a well thought out three dimensional character whose motivations are understood. I loved the supporting cast and all of their back stories as well. The plot connections made throughout the book and the secrets revealed all kept me interested and engaged. There are themes of love, friendship, motherhood, danger, mystery and more in this post-apocalyptic/dystopian book. Check it out!

DNF 38%

Well the description of The Rending and the Nest makes it obvious it's a weird dystopian world. And yet it isn't the inanimate objects being 'born' instead of live babies that's the weirdest.

Weird, weird, weird
Instead the most bizarre and frustrating thing is that the world has changed in a way that makes absolutely no sense. I don't need a scientific approach, just a moderately believable one. It can have future technology in it to account for capabilities we don't have; but, it still needs to be something that feels like it makes sense in some sort of context. The set-up to this dystopian place feels like author Kaethe Schwehn just wanted a certain setting and so magically just had it happen in a 'Rending' moment. This really bugged me as it's core to the story and the mystery to be solved.

Characters
While the writing is acceptable the descriptions and characterizations of the lead gal and others in the book are a bit flat. I didn't really connect with our main gal or her fellow group members. They all seemed a bit boring. More details of the 'before' lives might have helped or maybe more around the basic services and jobs each had in the group. It's touched upon for a few of our characters but I never really felt like I had a working understanding of their setting and therefore didn't know the characters.

Necessities of Existence
I went back and skimmed the first 20% of this book, before stopping entirely, to try and find a solid description for the main food source called ghost fruit. I never found one. When readers don't understand how energy is gained and consumed, in any story of any kind, then they fundamentally cannot connect or concentrate on a story. Instead we tend to get caught up in trying to decide how something is happening rather than what is happening. You can have a mysterious food or resource but make sure every detail the characters know is what your reader knows too.

Why do we need certain base elements?
The fundamentals of life must be present or at least touched upon and explained in order to allow us to relate to the characters. Be they characters that are AI, biological, corporeal or otherwise. The main fundamentals of life are: sustenance (how to get energy and maintain existence), waste (where does 'garbage' of any kind go) and shelter (it can move with you or constantly change but you generally have some shelter from elements at points during a period of time). Had Schwehn helped us understand the living situation better I think the mysteries would have intrigued me. Instead they really annoyed me as they just added to the nothing makes sense aura of this book.

Overall
There might be something here if a rewrite was to happen as the style of writing is okay but it's the content that bugs me. Overall the first 38% of this book (that I read) reminded me of one of my first DNF's a couple decades ago. Tad Williams series Otherworld had many of the same relational problems. Going too far into the strange and weird (which I normally love) without being smart about it. The thing I always remember that had me give up on Otherworld was when salad veggies were fighting utensils in a kitchen for dominance (I'm not even kidding) and the baby tomato drowns in the river after a utensil skewers him. Generally one would be devastated by a baby of any kind dying. Instead all I could do was laugh and say nope, putting the book down to never ever pick it up again. It's not that a conscious tomato was the problem it's the context in which it was portrayed. As though it was there to confuse you and nothing more. I am not a fan of these blatant, lazy illustrations of oddities. Read Alice in Wonderland if you want to see how odd, bizarre and crazy can be done really well. The key in Alice is Lewis Carrol sets up a relatable construct for each character be it a card guard, door mouse or Mad Hatter.

Finally, when I gave-up reading The Rending and the Nest I honestly didn't care about anything at all. There was no sense of a purpose or that I was reading anything more than a disjointed made up story with no message, purpose, morale or otherwise. While many authors believe they write for themselves the reality is the best books are written for the readers.

Really unique perspective on dystopian fiction. Fascinating read!

It’s not hard to see the attraction that certain genre conventions might hold for writers of a more literary bent. The richness of possibility that is offered by speculative fiction can open up some incredible paths for even the “serious” writer.

Post-apocalyptic fiction in particular seems to have that kind of pull. It’s not surprising; the end of the world and the new beginnings that follow can make for an exquisite canvas upon which to paint an impactful literary portrait.

Rarely does that collision of genre concepts, storytelling talent and big ideas result in anything as memorable, as powerful and as compelling as Kaethe Schwehn’s “The Rending and the Nest” (Bloomsbury; $26). Themes of community and faith intermingle with questions about the power of motherhood and the desperate desire to explain the unexplainable, all revolving around the very human necessity of sharing our own stories. It’s a sharp, fearless narrative – one rendered all the more impressive by the fact that it’s the author’s debut novel.

One day a few years ago, with no warning, approximately 95 percent of the world’s population disappeared in an event known only as the Rending. Those who remain are left to try and piece together some semblance of a life in a world that has been fundamentally altered. The sky is uniformly grey and the temperature is a steady 55 degrees. There is no rain, but the ground is periodically saturated with moisture every few days. Little grows other than root vegetables and mysterious “ghost fruit.”

Mira lives in a Midwestern settlement called Zion. She works as a scavenger in the Piles – giant jumbled heaps of items that appeared seemingly at random following the Rending – seeking anything that might be of use to the settlement. She has some friends and does her best to be of service to Zion, but she also keeps herself closed off for fear of what true connection might mean.

But four years after the Rending – years of isolation marked by the occasional visitor – something changes. Mira’s friend Lana gets pregnant; it’s the first pregnancy since the world disappeared. But what is initially cause for hope and celebration soon turns sinister, as Lana’s pregnancy takes an unexpected turn – a turn also taken by the pregnancies of those who follow.

The people of Zion struggle with these new Babies and what they might mean for the future, and when a new visitor arrives – a charismatic stranger with a flair for storytelling and a self-confidence that makes him almost reminiscent of the Before – he upends the status quo and pulls some Zionites into his orbit while others question his motives.

But when Mira herself becomes pregnant, she finds herself left with a difficult decision. Does she stay put and let go of those who have moved on, despite her fears that something sinister is afoot? Or does she risk everything – her life, the lives of her friends and even her Baby – to try and rescue the small piece of the world that still truly matters to her?

The best post-apocalyptic fiction lives in the space between knowing and not-knowing; there’s real power in mystery. “The Rending and the Nest” gets that exactly right – there’s no epiphany, no a-ha moment that reveals the reasons behind what took place. Instead, the reader is gifted with the stark reality of the situation – there’s no way of knowing what happened, or why. The survivors don’t know, so neither do we. That decision lends a bleak impact to the narrative, an underpinning of quiet desperation that permeates the entire story.

Schwehn has done something remarkable here, creating a rich and nuanced world that exists on a very small scale. She has shrunk the world – the action, despite the feelings of sweeping intensity that it inspires, takes place within just a few miles in terms of area. This relatively tiny chunk of Minnesota has been transformed into a microcosm of this new world, rife with examples of societal sorts good and bad alike. In a world where there’s little left, what little there is takes on a newfound importance; it’s that spirit that Schwehne captures so exquisitely.

The relationship dynamics are complex and difficult in all the right ways, with people who have been thrust together by circumstance gradually finding ways to embrace one another even as they continually struggle with their ignorance. They establish rules and assign tasks, assembling a simulacrum of civilization; it’s a poor replacement for what they’ve lost, but at least it’s something. Into this sad vestigial society, Schwehn pours love and anger and jealousy, betrayal and despair and hope; it’s a jumbled, complicated mess that reads as pure and true as anything you’ll find in a story set after the end of the world.

“The Rending and the Nest” is unafraid to challenge the reader, both narratively and conceptually. It is a starkly rendered book, built on brutally lyrical prose and intellectual provocation. It enlightens and entertains in a way that no debut novel should be able to accomplish. It is the type of beginning you always hope to get in stories about the end.

Ahoy there me mateys! I received this sci-fi eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. So here be me honest musings . . .

the rending and the nest (Kaethe Schwehn)

Title: the rending and the nest

Author: Kaethe Schwehn

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Publication Date: TODAY!!! (hardback/e-book)

ISBN: 978-1632869722

Source: NetGalley

This is truly wonderfully delightfully oddly bizarre. It is a post-apocalyptic book wherein 95% of the population disappears with no explanation. This becomes known as the Rending. Along with people, portions of buildings and other items simply disappear as well. Thousands of random objects are mixed together in towering Piles that dot the landscape.

In this new world, we are introduced to (and follow) Mira as she and fellow survivors try to make a new life in a settlement called Zion. The novel deals with the current day to day living and then switches into snippets of the past. The main issue appears when the first pregnancy of Zion post-Rending is announced. The settlement is fraught with excitement over the prospect of a new baby. Imagine the surprise when the new baby turns out to be an inanimate object.

So what does this mean? Read the novel and find out. Just be prepared that this is a slow burn, heavily detailed story. I found it fascinating, horrifying, and lyrical all at once. I am very glad I read it and have been thinking about it ever since I finished. It is certainly not a book for everyone, but it was perfect for me.

So lastly . . .

Thank you Bloomsbury USA!

3.5 Stars

This was an interesting, well-written book with an unusual post-apocalyptic, dystopian plot. Following a mysterious apocalyptic event termed The Rending, in a world with a vastly reduced population, Mira, the central character, lives in a community called Zion. Her days are spent sorting through the Piles, quite literally piles of debris left by The Rending, finding objects that might be put to use. Her friend Lana sometimes accompanies her but is primarily working as a prostitute in the community. Lana, and then ultimately the other fertile women of Zion, become pregnant and mysteriously give birth to objects. An interloper in the community, Michael, wields a cult-leader-like power and destabilizes the bonds between members of the community including Mira and Lana. Mira builds nests for the Babies. The original central members of Mira's group push back against Michael.

The plot setup is well executed but I found myself puzzling over the underlying premise. The Rending itself is never really explained. It wasn't a Rapture event (I was worried about that prospect from some elements of Mira's family life) and it wasn't a comet hitting the earth. It isn't a zombie apocalypse story, although I felt that there were similarities to the communities seen in stories like The Walking Dead with abusive or cultish leaders. Are those who survived just lucky? Are they the cursed few? The enigmatic nature of the story left me wanting a reader's guide or an explanation from the author about what she was going for here. I felt a bit deflated by the ending in which I felt had no greater insight than I had at the start.

Schwehn is a polished writer with an interesting premise. I just wish she'd given us more insight into The Rending and its survivors' purpose.

The Rending and the Nest by Kaethe Schwehn is a recommended addition to the post-apocalyptic genre.

"It wasn’t fire or ice. Wasn’t a virus or global warming or a meteor. Wasn’t an atomic bomb or a tsunami or a sulfurous-smelling ape. It was a Rending, a split. Ninety-five percent of the earth’s population and the vast majority of the animals, food, and goods—gone. We were left with each other and the Piles. Later, the Babies. And we were left without an explanation."

Mira lives in a society/town named Zion that was made from the remnants, the scraps, of what was left after the Rendering. Four years after the end of the world as she knew it, Mira now sorts through the piles - literally piles of things left behind - searching for useful items. When Mira's friend Lana announces her pregnancy, it is a time of hope, but when Lana gives birth to an object, and other women follow suit, Mira decides to make nests for these Babies. This helps the mothers by giving the objects a safe resting place and simultaneously allowing them to release their attachment to the objects. When an outsider called Michael appears in Zion, he changes the dynamics of the community and lures Lana away.

The Rending and the Nest almost begs for a reread, perhaps with a reader's guide, since there is more going on under the surface, or there could be more going on under the surface, than a quick read reveals. "Rending" itself is an odd word choice. It can mean to tear violently, divide, pull apart, split, or to distress with painful feelings, but it is also pointed out in the book that the name shares a connection with the rending, or tearing, of the curtain in the temple at the moment Jesus died. The tearing symbolized, in part (and I'm not a Biblical scholar), that God had moved out of that physical dwelling and was through with that temple and its religious system. Perhaps this rending signifies a finality with the earth and what it was before, thus the people gone and the piles of stuff left scattered about. (And, okay, I may be stretching here looking for some significance, so we'll set this aside.)

What I can say is that the world created by Schwehn is interesting, but enigmatic. We never know what happened or why. And what we do know is puzzling at times. Certainly loved ones are missed. The community of Zion gives people some sense of purpose and belonging, but there is always this conundrum in the background, seeking the ultimate answer when none is given.

It is also beautifully written, for all its inscrutability. The plot, which is slow at first, picks up the pace after a third of the way through. The characters are basically well-developed, but broken in some way. The characters reflect the prismatic nature of humans, good and bad, challenging and comforting, open and closed-off. I liked parts of the novel ravenously, and other parts not-as-much. And, while reading, I kept getting this nagging feeling that I was missing something, that some clue or hint, or monumental reveal was just beyond my grasp.

So, I liked The Rending and the Nest, but I didn't love it. On the other hand I kept thinking I needed that reading guide to uncover what I was missing, because I was sure I was missing something. The novel felt like a puzzle to me and I was missing one vital piece... I need to reread this one someday

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Bloomsbury USA
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2018/02/the-rending-and-nest.html
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2299454679
https://www.librarything.com/work/20581171/reviews/152133578
https://www.facebook.com/shetreadssoftly/
https://twitter.com/SheTreadsSoftly/status/965037530918907904

One moment, Mira was at the mall shopping with her little brother. The next instant, 95% of the world’s population vanished, along with sunlight, most of the animals, food, and stuff. What isn’t missing is in huge random piles. The survivors eke out a living by scavenging the Piles and banding together in haphazard communities.

Four years after the Rending, Mira spends her days scavenging for her community of Zion, hanging out with her best friend, Lana, and avoiding people she might come to love—she can’t bear to lose anyone else. Then Lana tells her she’s pregnant, the first pregnancy since the Rending. For the first time since everything changed, Mira feels hope.

But when Lana gives birth to an inanimate object—and so do other women in Zion—Mira’s world crumbles again. An outsider named Michael lures Lana away, and Mira must decide how much she’s willing to sacrifice to save her friend, her community, and her own pregnancy.

I’m not going to lie: this is an odd book. Dystopian, with no explanation for why the Rending occurred (so if you must have a “why,” you’re out of luck here). The world is both strangely familiar and oddly skewed, like everything is just a bit off-kilter. Mira and Lana—well, everyone—are hiding secrets from their before, secrets that they need to deal with before they can truly accept their now. The Babies are creepy—and weirdly fitting—and I was drawn into the story from the first page as Mira struggles to make sense of this new world while still trying to sort out just who she is. Despite the oddness, this is an enthralling book, with a vividly realized setting that’s just as intriguing as the characters.

(Galley provided by Bloomsbury USA in exchange for an honest review.)

This wasn't bad but it also didn't feel particularly unique. I haven't even read that many dystopians and this felt like it borrowed from them all in one way or another. That being said, it was definitely atmospheric and well written. I didn't fall in love with the characters but I also don't think that was the goal of the author. The book represented something more, which I appreciated. I don't know that I can say that I enjoyed reading this but, again, I'm not sure if I should have enjoyed it. I ultimately felt that this wasn't unique enough to captivate me but also that there were a lot of questions unanswered.

The Rending and the Nest comes out next week on February 20, 2018, and you can purchase HERE. This book definitely wasn't as good as either Gold Fame Citrus or Station Eleven but it has echoes of both as well as The Book of the Unnamed Midwife.

Chester leaned back and reached into the small pocket above the regular front pocket on his jeans. I'd always wondered what that tiny pocket was for and now I had the answer: that little pocket was for holding fortunes after the apocalypse.

The word that best describes THE RENDING AND THE NEST would, in my opinion, be: Bizarre. But, that isn't quite fair. To leave that as its only descriptor would be incomplete.

Most post-apocalyptic fiction follows a pattern, a well-used and much-loved formula used by authors that works most every time. In this book, not only is that formula not used, it is thrown off a fifty-foot cliff into an ocean occupied by mutant octopuses. (No, there is no such thing in the book as mutant octopuses... I made that up.)

The idea that an event occurs wherein 95% of the population simply vanishes with no explanation is not new. In fact, Fundamentalist Christians have believed in something called "The Rapture" since as early as the 1830s.

I am NOT saying this book is about the Rapture, it could very well be that is exactly what happened, but despite a myriad of suggestions as to the event's origin or meaning, the author intentionally leaves the reader in the same state of curious inquisitiveness as the characters. They want to know what happened and why, and what it all means, but they are left to wonder and to theorize, the same as the reader. All they know for sure is that somehow their world was charged in an instant and most everyone they knew disappeared.

Jumping forward to a few years 'post-event,' Mira and the group she bonded with on the day their world was forever changed, are now living in a small colony they dubbed "Zion."

Mira's best friend Lana discovers she is pregnant and after nine months gives birth, not to a living baby, but to a plastic object. The shock, grief and incredulity begin to wear off as more "babies" are "born."

Mira needs to figure out what is going on and how best she can protect those she loves.

When a traveler arrives and tells them about 'The Zoo,' their world view shifts.

This book brings up profound questions. Questions that are not only relevant to the characters in the book, but also to the reader and to every single person on the planet:
* What is love?
* What is the point of existence? (In other words; what is the meaning of life?)
* What makes us who we are? Is it our history? Is it our family?
*Who are we when everything is stripped away? Are we the same person? Do we want to be the same person?

If you enjoy books that are post-apocalyptic and/or are outside of the norm, this book is for you.

I rate THE RENDING AND THE NEST as 4 out of 5 Stars. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Summary: A global event, which is not named, occurs and a large majority of the Earths population disappears. The few humans have banded together in different habitations to try to continue civilization among mysterious piles of garbage.


What I liked: I enjoyed The Rending and the Nest. The characters are likable and well written. The story was interesting and a little mysterious because the reader is never told what happened to the rest of society. I also enjoy the fact that this story was not just about survival, there are some pretty interesting themes throughout the story; redemption, loss and forgiveness stood out in my mind.


What I didn't like: The story started to go a bit stagnate for me about three quarters of a way through the book. The introduction and side trip to the zoo felt a little rushed. I felt like I was in a fun house and was being pulled along instead of being allowed to meander.


Star Rating: 4


My thoughts: This was a enjoyable read but I feel like maybe the author was pushing to finish the story. The first three quarters of the book meandered and I was enjoying the characters and the world building. Then it was like, you were off to the races.


Release Date: February 29th, 2018


I would like to thank NetGalley and Bloomsbury the opportunity to read an advanced copy for review. I would also like to thank Sara New over at Bloomsbury for providing a digital copy of the cover art work.

This is a dystopian story that feels vaguely like stories I have read before. Some plot twists made it somewhat exciting but ultimately felt slightly confusing and come from out of nowhere.

I received an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I requested this book because I am a sucker for post-apocalypse fiction and the self-comparisons to Station Eleven, which I absolutely loved. But this book did not really work for me. An apocalypse happens and none of the survivors know why. It’s a great premise, and it sets the table nicely for one of the book’s main themes: no one ever knows the whole story, so the only thing you get to decide is the story you’re going to tell yourself about what’s happened.

Unfortunately, there’s just not much story here. Not a lot happens over the course of the book. The antagonist does not appear until almost halfway through. The writing is nice, and occasionally lovely (“[I] knew that a prayer was exposing the soft belly of fear to light”). But the plot drags in several places, and the author resorts to telling rather than showing too often.

In an interesting but odd twist on the dystopian genre, Kaethe Schwehn narrates the end of the world from the point of view of a young woman. After the Rending, in which not just people but animals, things, and sunshine have disappeared, Mira and her friends found a community known as Zion. After a surprising turn regarding pregnancy and birth, Zion is visited by Michael, a creepy cult type leader of a place called the Zoo. As the novel reaches it's apex, and the confrontation between Mira and the Zionists and Michael comes to a head, the author fails to engage the reader in caring. The characters were too one dimensional for me to actually want Mira and the Zionists to come out okay.
While the premise is interesting, and the writing clear, the book just fails to grab the reader, to create that sense of concern that is necessary in dystopian novels with this type of conflict.

Thanks to NetGalley, Kaethe Schewehn, and Bloomsbury for an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher, Bloomsbury USA, for the ARC and opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

5 stars, fantastic sci-fi and speculative fiction for the adult reader.

The Rending and the Nest is one of the most compelling, unique, sad, and hopeful books that I have read. At its core this is a character-driven book set in a post-apocalyptic setting, using that setting to delve into topics of community and the human condition... when everything we knew from before is left behind, how do we persevere?

"The most dangerous thing of all is the absence of a story, a narrative to explain what is happening to you. A why with no edges. Because someone will always arrive to invent one."

This is a beautifully written novel about the creation of your own story in the wake of some kind of world event that eliminates 95% of the world's inhabitants. The narrator is Mira, who was 17 years old when the Rending happened and her tale describes the happenings of the six subsequent years. An explanation is never provided for what happened, but much like the characters in the book, that answer became less important to me as I continued to read - the Rending was a new birth for those that remained, a new beginning. The world they inhabit after allowed themselves distance from their past if they so chose. The world After was not necessarily better, just different. While the characters long for the Before as the greener pastures, their lost family and friends, there is some clarity in that people tend to always want something other than where they are - always wanting more, or different - and that was no different in the Before.

This is an amazing book about the human condition and what drives each and every one of us. I cannot recommend this book enough.

The dystopian genre of speculative fiction may be reaching a tipping point or burn-out, but if novels like Schwehn's become the norm then we have nothing to worry about. This simple yet inventive novel is the kind of allegory that challenges not just our understanding in a metaphorical sense but requires us to stretch emotionally. Brilliant.

The Rending and the Nest has a very intriguing premise. A post-apocalyptic world with a mystery sprinkled with themes of motherhood, survival, and community. Unfortunately, the pacing, writing, and characters were dull.

The Rending and the Nest is a very slow paced book. Schwehn take hers time building the world and main character, Mira. I loved getting intimate details about the world post Rending and Mira as a character, but it took Schwehn almost half the book to accomplish. The synopsis above explains that a man named Michael will arrive thereby creating some plot movement. However, he doesn’t arrive until 41% through the novel. Despite the slow start, I didn’t feel like DNF’ing it. The world and pregnancies were too interesting and shrouded in mystery to put down.

The writing felt overly poetic. It read as if Schwehn was trying her absolute hardest to write as sophisticatedly as possible. The metaphors and similes were jarring and pulled me out of the story rather than flowing smoothly.

I really enjoyed Mira and her best friend, Lana. I was able to connect with them almost immediately. However, the other characters weren’t as well developed or relied on one particular trait to describe them and the way they behaved.

What peaked my interest in this novel the most was The Rending itself. Where did 95% of the population disappeared to? Why did they disappear? Was it random? Were people targeted specifically? None of these questions are answered. There aren’t even hints of an answer within the text. The build up of the mystery of The Rending throughout the novel created suspense and intrigue, but by the end of the novel I was incredibly frustrated with the lack of answers.

Overall, The Rending and the Nest is not for everyone and, apparently, I am not one of those people. It is a unique post-apocalyptic story because of its focus on motherhood, community, and loss, however the story failed to perform after it had caught my attention.



***I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.