This was a haunting heart-wrenching tale. It was well written from beginning to end. This was a story I thought about long after I finished reading.

I really enjoyed this book, it had parts that reminded me of the book The Road, but was more hopeful. The zombies were good and scary and I really enjoyed the main character,

Meh. A girl living in a zombie world knows nothing but how to survive. She leaves safety for answers, to which she only receives a few. She confirms some truths, discovers more lies. There is a bit too much flashbacking for my taste, as it is the only method by which we learn about this greater world. There is nothing new in this story with nothing very exciting happening. I never embraced Orpen’s character enough to care about her future. The writing is mediocre as well. Overall, nothing spectacular.

Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff surprised me. I was expecting a run of the mill zombie novel – perfect autumn reading – but not a thoughtful story of survival and loneliness. Living on an island off the coast of Ireland, Orpen’s childhood has been as idyllic as possible, given the skrake (zombies left to roam the countryside of mainland Ireland). Orphaned after the death of her mother and her partner Maeve, Orpen leaves the island in search of someone, anyone else left out there. She scours the country, her journey fueled by tantalizing scraps of decades old newspapers and flyers, searching for the banshees. Who and what they are? She has no idea. Davis-Goff’s novel is riveting, a tense road trip through a ravaged Ireland. Orpen grapples with isolation, loneliness, and fear, determined to find out if she’s the last one left alive. A solid addition to post apocalyptic literature.

It's rare that I make a snap decision about whether or not to read a book by just the first page, but it happened with this one. While I respect the fact that the author didn't shy away from unpleasant bodily experiences when writing a woman action character, that doesn't mean I want the first sentence to be about that character pulling off her own damaged toenail.

A quick and interesting read, I enjoyed being immersed in Davis-Goff's beautiful sentences and incredibly realistic (not to mention visceral) fight sequences. I'm not particularly bothered by the book's lack of "Irishness" that some reviewers have commented on, but then again I'm the sort who would be furious if anyone said "Mad Max" wasn't "Australian enough" or "Blade Runner" wasn't "American enough" or Margaret Atwood's "Oryx & Crake" books aren't "Canadian enough." So. If you want to satisfy your fetishization of the Irish countryside, maybe watch "P.S. I Love You" but don't look for languid sunsets on the Irish coast here.

No, my main complaints are more to do with structure, and the way that Davis-Goff unveils information, both of which are down to personal taste. It was clear from within fifty pages of this book's conclusion that it would never be able to tie up all of its loose ends without seguing into a sequel. And I sincerely hope that there is a sequel! As it currently stands, this book simply feels unfinished, and somewhat disorganized. But I need to know a lot more about the larger world in which our main character, Orpen, finds herself. I need more of Mam and Maeve just doing their thing, and being a couple. I need to understand why the society from which they're all running is so evil, because hints about constraints on what women can be or do isn't enough. (Maybe I'm just thick-headed?) I'm content with what I'm told about the Skrake and when; they're zombies, after all, and there's only so much you can do with zombies other than populate your world with them and use them to move chess pieces on the board of a book's plot. But the people? I need to know way, way more. And Davis-Goff assumes a posture towards her readers that I find frustrating (and all-too-common just now in speculative fiction), in that it assumes readers care more about a lyrically beautiful line than about the information it obfuscates. I don't. And withholding information in order to create some sort of mysterious aesthetic just makes me frustrated, not full of delighted suspense.

Certainly not a bad book, but also not my personal favorite. I will hungry tear into any sequel, of course, because I need my questions answered!

A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness and is republished here with permission.

Sarah Davis-Goff's view of dystopian Ireland is vividly displayed through fierce adolescent protagonist Orpen. As Last Ones Left Alive begins, Orpen is boldly pushing toward potential salvation. She's alone save for her dog and her birth mother's partner, Maeve, bound and ambiguously lifeless in a wheelbarrow.

The narrative compellingly alternates between Orpen's perilous quest and what necessitated it. Portentous flashbacks paint solitary yet idyllic beginnings on an abandoned island with her mothers Mam and Maeve, where the state of the world was a mystery and death seemed far away. The existence of the zombie-like skrake, "real enough to kill you dead," is also tantalizingly revealed.

Orpen's childhood ends abruptly at seven when she's given a set of knives and a punishing training regimen under Maeve's tutelage. When disaster strikes, Orpen takes her warrior ways on the road, trying to find a mysterious city mentioned by her mothers. Warned not to trust others, Orpen fights a longing for people, one thing she has in common with skrake, and an encounter with other survivors hurls her plans along an even more dangerous path.

In her debut novel, Irish author Davis-Goff, co-founder of Tramp Press, writes Orpen's apocalyptic world in a compelling cadence and shines at the bleak details--a road is "barely a path, a rough line, like a finger drawn across dry dirt." Her fight scenes hit the sweet spot and help highlight the natural feminist bent of the work. Despite the grim surroundings, there is beauty in Orpen's world, where she was taught to survive, but also how to live.

STREET SENSE: A dystopian future filled with zombie-like creatures and a strong young girl trying to make her way to salvation. Some minor hiccups involving the folks she meets on the road, but overall this was a cool read.

COVER NERD SAYS: I like this cover quite a bit. I'm a sucker for a road to nowhere (I'm living that metaphor), but I really dig the red X. A simple addition to the art that adds more than two simple lines to the mystery. I can't take much issue with the cover blurb since the text was kept very small, but if you're going to use a blurb, is "A riveting novel" enough to use cover space? Ivey's full blurb is on the back and the rest of it is much more powerful.

This was a mismatch in style for me, though I can certainly see the appeal of a tale told like LAST ONES LEFT ALIVE. The premise is chilling and the worldbuilding fundamentals really worked for me, but I never quite clicked with the viewpoint, which made initially getting into the book a little rough. I think LOLA will suffer from the frequent comparisons I've seen to Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven. They nominally share some traits (more literary takes on similar genre elements), but the prose styles are radically different, and the sprawling world of Station Eleven feels more lived in than LOLA. I would be interested to read more from Davis-Goff, and will certainly keep an eye out for future works.

I think it’s generally true — though of course there are exceptions — that mystery novels tend to be about a city. The murder is a wound on the body politic, a blister where something imperfect about the social system rubs. The detectives then move through the various socioeconomic layers of the community, and often find submerged and surprising connections between this sub-culture and that, between families, between the powerful and the powerless. The city can be a small town, or a farming community, or a section of a larger metropolis, but mysteries move through a tight geography, the social layers stirred up like blood in water. The old saw is that the personal is political, and the mystery turns this inside out, in the very oldest senses of the words.

The apocalyptic novel, by contrast, tends to be about something bigger than a city: the nation, or, if that schema is too vague and high-level, the region or country. (I mean this last not to mean nation, but more broad area: north country, back country.) The Road is a Western. The Reapers are the Angels and This Dark Earth are both Southern Gothics. Station Eleven details my Northern Midwest. Parable of the Sower moves through California, and also Black America, a region that is not defined by geography, but nonetheless exists. There are dozens of apocalypses that detail that vast region of America — both the cityest of American cities, and a whole microcosm unto itself — New York: the elegiac Zone One, the chilly millennial Severance, the trash poetry of Monster Island. The writer destroys everything they know, and then sets to scrying the bones, throwing them down to see the immutable characteristics in the cant of ash. The apocalypse strips everything down to essentials: Rick Grimes clings imperfectly to his notions of family and the constabulary; Candace Chen hides behind a camera documenting it all for an Internet that’s blinking out; Mark Spitz relies on the law of averages; some found religions; for others, the play’s the thing. Each acts out their most basic instinct, culturally speaking, as they do the needful of water and food and safety.

One of the most pervasive modes of the apocalyptic novel is that of the road trip: if you’re going to get the pulse of the country, you have to cover some ground. During the road trip, the protagonist finds all the signposts marred and twisted, the roads empty and menacing, snarled with cars, overgrown, rotting. During the road trip, the destination is an illusion; worse, in the apocalypse, so is the road. It is here we first meet Orpen of Sarah Davis-Goff’s Last Ones Left Alive: rolling a wheelbarrow through a quietly destroyed Ireland, with a dog called Danger at her side. (This name is occasionally unintentionally comedic.) One of her more uncomfortable parents — her Mam’s Maeve — is in the wheelbarrow, shaking out with sweats and so silent you mistake her for dead. Maybe Orpen talks to her like a superego, like Job’s unhelpful friends in his blackest hour. But she’s not dead: Maeve has been bitten, about to turn into one of the skrake Orpen has been trained to kill her whole life. Orpen holds onto her childhood by keeping Maeve alive; when Maeve turns, something like Orpen’s childhood will have to die.

When I read The Bray House by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, it seemed to me that when the Irish kill their homeland, the result in fiction is more autopsy than spectacle, a long landscape pan instead of a detonation. Ní Dhuibhne nukes Ireland to a hard nuclear crust, and then lays out the debris with a cold hand. (Lord, but her main character is chilly.) The cataclysm in Last Ones Left Alive is similarly remote in time from the events unspooling, and much of the novel is spent detailing an Ireland in a green dishevelment. The events of the novel move forward and back in time from Orpen and her wheelbarrow, moving from her upbringing on the secluded island of Slanbeg off the west coast of Ireland, out onto the mainland and into Orpen’s matriculation. Though there are some interactions with the skrake — zombies in everything but name — it seemed notable to me how quiet this novel was for a zombie novel. In her youth, Orpen — named after the Irish painter best known for his depictions of WWI soldiers — often ditches her mothers to scratch about in the ephemera of that lost world in their island enclave. (She’s especially take by the graffiti and old newspapers referencing the Banshee: a fighting troupe comprised of women only.) Orpen has been raised in a safe kind of danger, drilled fairly mercilessly (especially by Maeve) but still protected from the real dangers of her world. There are no skrake on Slanbeg.

On the mainland, Orpen is pushing east toward the semi-mythical Phoenix City, where maybe her Mam and Maeve were from. (She doesn’t know much more than that; Mam and Maeve were always very closed mouth about where they were from, and why they left. She’s not Maeve’s biological child either way, and both Orpen’s parents drill her in the dangers of men.) She’s got the hyper-vigilance of the traumatized, spooking at every movement and worrying about the sound of the barrow’s squeaking wheel despite her enclosed upbringing. It’s an interesting mix: her safe upbringing that is nonetheless steeped in so much terror that she exhibits the earmarks of post-traumatic stress.

This reminded me of Colson Whitehead’s coinage of PASD — pronounced past — post-apocalyptic stress disorder. This neologism made me smile when I encountered it in Zone One — how clever — but I’m beginning to think it might be a real thing. Last week my son asked me to come out for a “porch talk” — he does this because he can find me smoking and I’m captive — and he burst into tears about the burning Amazon rain forests, the burning arctic, the geologically fast moving apocalypse we can find on the planet right now. I’m not going to be able to grow up and have children, he said to me, as he wept. I tried to soothe him, but I don’t like lying too much: There’s no reason it’s going to be “okay”, that blandest of reassurances, and the global environmental situation is well out of my control. I’d almost welcome just having to drill him in how to kill a reanimated corpse, because that is a concrete and discrete problem in the world: Either you kill or you die, but you don’t linger on in a worsening world, watching your possibilities narrow to ugly survival.

I was always irritated by religious fictions that brought down the conflict between good and evil into a fist fight. (I’m slagging, here, on C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.) It always seemed like a cop out, even though I get the structural satisfaction of just punching evil into the floor. I’m a huge fan of punching Nazis — they fucking deserve it — but no country defeats them by individuals punching them one at a time. But I’m beginning to get why, beyond mere narrative catharsis, we write the apocalypse this way: half a generation past the panic, in a regrowing world swallowing up the vestiges of modernity.

The apocalyptic novel is about a country, not a city. In a city, your interactions with strangers might be colored by ties of consanguinity. I know I play the Name Game whenever I meet someone in Duluth, and though I wasn’t even raised here — my father was — it only takes minutes to find a connection. But the in the country, this won’t work. You’re going to rely on the broader cultural playbook between strangers, the one full up with the subtle gestures only the acculturated will understand. (Of course, those gestures are still going to fail as often as not. The Ireland she was raised in was right there off the coast, but she has never quite lived there. ) So yeah, it’s a fistfight, the kind we find between Orpen and people she finds on the road. It can come down to a fistfight once all the other fights have been lost. There’s something almost comforting about pushing past the world where children despair of a future bleaker than their past into one where everyday survival is a victory.

Davis-Goff is maybe a little too light in her allusions to the larger Ireland Orpen is moving though and into. I wasn’t quite clear how exactly the Banshees fit with both Maeve and Mam, and the ersatz family she encounters on the road. Is Phoenix City a Handmaid’s Tale style nightmare, or its opposite in sensibilities, if not particulars? But whatever, this is fine. Last Ones Left Alive is a credible sounding of the Irish apocalypse. It’s nowhere near as brutal as Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s, but then that’s an impossible standard. The horror of Last Ones Left Alive ends up being a comfort; Orpen abides, like Ireland always has, and in Ireland’s particular way.

The terms “well written” and “post-apocalypse” don’t always go together. Neither do “thoughtful” and “zombies”, but here we are. This does remind me a little of The Road, but is not so distressingly bleak. I think it reminds me most of a recent title A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher.

Orpen was raised by her birth mother and her mother’s partner, Maeve, on a secluded island off the coast of Ireland. They have trained her to face a hostile world, zombie-like creatures, and the threat of a disintegrating human society. They can’t keep her safe forever, and this book begins with her on the road trying to find her place in the hellscape this world has become.

It is a well written book. Orpen’s language reflects her isolation, but also her intense love for her family. The story itself is a rumination on dealing with grief and loss, as well as how we cope with the dangers of the world ouside our small circle of intimate friends and family. Do we choose to isolate ourselves, or do we take a chance and leave the safety of our homes in a search for meaning and belonging? Orpen, is a courageous and capable young woman whose desire to see more of the outside world at once endangers and illuminates her life.

Song for this book: Hounds of Love – Kate Bush

DNF. The writing style feels choppy. A lot of telling vs letting reader discover on their own. I’m not connecting to the main character. She’s mostly just walking around, however there are minimal descriptions about the environment or what she’s thinking or feeling. Unfortunately, it’s just not working for me, so I’m going to pass on the rest of it. Thanks for the opportunity to give it a try.

The Last Ones Left Alive was a tense page turner, set in Ireland, a generation or so after a zombie apocalypse seemed to have killed everyone in the country. The writing was spare & almost poetic, told in 2 different timelines, the present and the few years leading up to it. It was hauntingly descriptive yet only hinted at what had happened all those years ago. The main character who is around 15, was too young to remember “before” and was raised in isolation by 2 people while didn’t tell her anything. So now that she’s on her own, she sets out to find some other people & hopefully some answers.
So while I enjoyed the storyline, everything was very vague & answers are never really found. Some things were explained, but I like more of a backstory & more of a resolution than this book offered. Perhaps there will be a sequel?

"Last Ones Left Alive" by Sarah Davis-Goff is a story about a post apocalyptic Ireland where the fight to survive and endure means to live another day.

From the first line of this novel, I knew I was hooked. The story alternates from current to the past on how Orpen, the protagonist, was raised in an island called Slanbeg off the coast of Ireland by her mother and her mother’s partner Maeve. Orpen was trained how to fight and survive against what Davis-Goff calls the zombies or “skrakes”. Once bitten, your fate will be met with demise. The novel opens with Orpen pushing a wheelbarrow with Maeve and her dog by her side to find help and other survivors.

I love anything Zombie and I knew I would be a fan of this. I love that women are strong and resilient, and the story is told to understand the human relationships and survival.

Thank you to NetGalley and Flatiron book for the ARC ebook copy of this wonderful story.

Reminiscent of The Road and A Boy and his Dog at the End of the World, Last Ones Left Alive is a literary take on the zombie escape journey. The novel starts out with Orpen and her mother’s partner traveling through a post apocalyptic Ireland to an almost mystical place called Phoenix City. They had lived on a small island off the coast of the mainland until Maeve was bitten and now Orpen carries her in a wheelbarrow with the hope of a cure.

Above all else, Orpen is a fighter. Trained for many years by her Mam and Maeve to wield her knifes and block and parry, she feels she is ready to venture out on her own. Flashbacks begin most of the chapters telling about the lessons Orpen learned from her protectors on the little island. To always be alert, to never trust men, to strike first… The skrakes (as Davis-Goff calls the zombies) are just as vicious as any other terrible undead you’ve read about and seen in film. And there’s an interesting transition to becoming one that is described in these pages.

Last Ones Left Alive deals with themes of isolation, women’s empowerment, and coming-of-age. Orpen’s parents kept a lot from her in an effort to protect her from the outside. Their little island was free from skrakes, but when they leave she sees that not all is as she thought. The city dwellers have a distinct way of looking at the world and when she meets up with the few that are still alive, Orpen sees that the world is a much different place than she realized.

I found some very good lines in this short novel. It is quick read and held my interest like that first season of The Walking Dead. She had a goal and the small objectives kept changing as conditions worsened. There’s a lot of depth as one can pick through the underlying meanings of the world that the author has built.

I recommend this one for a reader looking for a strongly-written zombie thriller.

4 out of 5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley, Flatiron Books, and the author for an advanced copy for review.

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

last ones left alive (Sarah Davis-Goff)

Title: last ones left alive

Author: Sarah Davis-Goff

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Publication Date: TODAY! (hardback/e-book in U.S.)

ISBN: 978-1250235220

Source: NetGalley

I picked up this book because it was described as being like the road (loved) or station eleven (one of the best books ever!) but set in Ireland with zombies and a feminist bent.  Sadly I only made it to the 20% mark before giving up on this completely. 

I couldn't connect with the main character, Orpen, at all.  I thought that Orpen dragging her sick companion around in a wheelbarrow was silly and should have led to her death multiple times during the brief portion of the book that I read.  The dog companion was pointless to the plot and basically did nothing useful either. 

Even though the setting is Ireland, there was nothing in the story to evoke a feeling of that country.  It could have been set anywhere else with little change to the story.  I also did not like the first-person narration style or the use of flashbacks for the history of the characters.  The flashbacks were jarring. 

Then there be the skrakes i.e. zombies.  These are super fast zombies that roam in packs and can seemingly track deer by scent.  But somehow Orpen manages to only encounter them one on one and dispatch them with some unrealistic hand-to-hand fighting and a couple of knives.  Plus of the two she fought in the 20%, one was a small zombie and the other was crippled which helped lead to her victory.  That was lucky given that the author reiterates multiple times how much weaker the trek is making Orpen.  With the defeat of the second zombie came the realization that this book was not to me taste at all.

Some of me crew members are highly enjoying this one but the little bit that I read was less than stellar and rather formulaic.  Check it out and see if ye be on the side of yer Captain or with the crew.

So lastly . . .

Thank you Flatiron Books!

Goodreads has this to say about the novel:

Watch your six. Beware tall buildings. Always have your knives.

Growing up on a tiny island off the coast of a post-apocalyptic Ireland, Orpen's life has revolved around physical training and necessity. After Mam died, it's the only way she and her guardian Maeve have survived the ravenous skrake (zombies) who roam the wilds of the ravaged countryside, looking for prey.

When Maeve is bitten and infected, Orpen knows what she should do - sink a knife into her eye socket, and quickly. Instead, she tries to save Maeve, and following rumours of a distant city on the mainland, guarded by fierce banshees, she sets off, pushing Maeve in a wheelbarrow and accompanied by their little dog, Danger. It is a journey on which Orpen will need to fight repeatedly for her life, drawing on all of her training and instincts. In the course of it, she will learn more about the Emergency that destroyed her homeland, and the mythical Phoenix City - and discover a starting truth about her own identity.

To visit the author’s twitter go to:

Sarah Davis-Goff - Author

To buy the novel please visit:

last ones left alive - Book

To add to Goodreads go to:

Yer Ports for Plunder List

Ever since I fell in love with Maeve Binchy's writing years ago, I have actively sought out books set in Ireland. And given that I love dystopians, I thought that The Last Ones Left Alive would be a perfect marriage of the two.

But I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this book. The writing was beautiful--there's a poetic lyricism that forces you to follow and I really enjoyed the Irish lilt in the narrative. But other things fell flat and there were two many questions left unanswered.

I had a hard time connecting from the beginning. I thought at first Orpen was the mother and Maeve her small child. It took a bit for me to realize that it was quite the other way around--Orpen was the child (teenager? I never really got any true feeling for her age) and she's carting around the unconscious body of one of the women who raised her (There is the slightest of hints that this is her mother's lover). Also jarring is the addition of a dog named Danger. Because I wasn't entirely invested and my attention would drift, I kept thinking literal danger was about to befall Orpen. But the prose is so lovely that I had to continue.

But no, for an end of the world drama with vicious zombies supposedly lurking everywhere, there's decidedly not a whole lot of danger until quite near the end of the novel.

I'm also growing weary of the zombie genre and those that declare all men are to be loathed/feared/reviled, especially in this one, when no real explanation is given for why.

I did think the back and forth transition to give both Orpen's past and present was interesting, and overall, I'm glad to have read this, but I can't say that it will stay with me for any length of time. It feels very much like there will be a sequel to this, because, after all, once the Banshees finally arrive on scene, it's the end of the book and there's not a lot of closure. I'm not sure if I would be tempted to read on.

Thank you to NetGalley and Flatiron Books for giving me the opportunity to review this ARC.

Last Ones Left Alive turns zombie fiction into a heartfelt character piece that highlights the power of family and perseverance at the end of times. The zombies, or skrakes in this instance, are as gory and gross as you’d imagine. They’re just a small part of the story, representing an obstacle as our protagonist sets out to fulfill what she believes to be her destiny. It’s heartbreaking at times, thrilling at others, and ultimately a moving look at the final sparks of the human race.

A couple of small spoilers below!

A NO NONSENSE PROTAGONIST
Galen is a multi-faceted character, mixing a deep love for her family with an animalistic will to survive. We see her trudging through the countryside, fighting against physical threats and the mental blocks she needs to overcome before she can move on with her life. Recent tragedies have hardened her outlook on the world and in the beginning, she struggles quite a bit. The book switches between present and past, juxtaposing her happy childhood with the difficulties of her adult life. It makes for an interesting tale about the hard realities of growing up and leaving the ideals of childhood behind.

THE POWER OF FAMILY
At its heart, Last Ones Left Alive is a family drama that highlights the unlikeliness of a small family surviving alone on an island off the coast of Ireland. We see Orpen growing from child to teen to young woman, desperately wanting to join the world that’s outside of her grasp. Her mother and Maeve teach her to become a fighter, arming her with the skills she needs to survive in this post-zombie apocalypse world. This focus highlights how important and rare family can be. At the end, when all hope is lost, having a support system that cares for you more than anything else can save you.

STICKING UP FOR MANKIND
This is a growth piece for Orpen as she’s forced to accept the needs of other people beyond her mother and Maeve. At first, she’s openly hostile toward strangers who try to help her and, in her refusal to accept facts, she nearly gets everyone killed. She eventually morphs from a fighter trying to save herself into a true banshee who fights for mankind at large. It’s an inspiring journey.

A BADASS GROUP OF WOMEN WARRIORS
I’m obsessed with this ultra-trained, elite group of women warriors who roam the countryside killing any and all skrakes who cross their paths. The world has become a pretty terrible place and they’ve risen up to take the land back for themselves.

NOTE: I was provided a free copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for my honest, unbiased review.

Slightly different take on the zombie apocalypse genre. At times interesting, but wrapped up too quickly/neatly. Felt like a rushed letdown.

Thank you to NetGalley for a Kindle ARC of The Last Ones Left Alive.

I love a post-apocalyptic zombie story as much as the next person so I was excited when my request was approved. I'm always looking for authors who could put an original spin on an often told tale.

Orpen lives a sheltered and isolated life on an island in Ireland. The only people she knows is her Mum, and her Mum's life partner, Maeve.

Orpen has spent the better part of her young life training and preparing for the inevitable; when she leaves the mainland to seek survivors of the skrake.

When her Mum dies, and Maeve is grievously injured, Orpen leaves the only happy home she's ever had and ventures to a desolate civilization to seek help.

But, as always in these stories, nothing is what it seems.

I like Orpen as a character; she's plucky and fierce, yet at the same time, I didn't like her.

She seemed cold, perhaps because she grew up with no real friends and social interaction with other people other than her mothers and was taught to be wary of strangers.

The story is told in two timelines, Orpen's childhood and survival on the island with two formidable women, and the present, as she travels with a wounded Maeve in a wheelbarrow.

The writing is good, but there is little world building.

Readers get little exposition on the skrake; How did this happen?

How long did it take for the world to end?

How did women get divided into two categories; Banshees and Breeders?

I don't mind ambiguity where the reader has to use her or her imagination but more details wouldn't hurt.

The scenes with the skrake are well written and there are moments of urgency and tension, though I never felt scared or worried. But, it takes a lot to scare me.

I would have liked more interactions between Orpen and other survivors, demonstrating her ability to adapt to meeting new people and learning about the world.

The ending was unexpected but I liked it just for that reason.

This wasn't a bad read but it's not for everyone, especially if you're looking for a straight forward story about people running from even faster zombies.

A good post-apocalyptic, people-eating zombie novel set in Ireland and on one of its offshore islands. Orpen, her Mam, and Maeve, her Mam's lover, live mostly safely on their small island after a zombie plague kills off most of the world. Maeve trains Orpen on combat; Mam teachers her about medicinal herbs. When Mam and Maeve must travel to the island, Orpen, still a small child, fends for herself. Mam comes back infected, and Maeve forces Orpen to begin making the hard decisions and even harder actions her life now requires.