realistically I understand that the end of the world due to global warming wouldn't be an action packed event but this took the end of the world being boring to an extreme. We follow Rose, a prostitute in "camp zero" a commune/college/safe place for Americans being built in Canada. We also have chapters from Grant's and White Alice's prospective.

This books seems to want to push a message. It often reads as a fable. It also pushes some extreme feminism, like "kill all men" type feminism. A lot of anti-consumerism, kill the rich, anti-cell phone, pro sex work, and feminism.

Overall this wasn't for me but that just means I'm not the target reader not that this book is bad. I'd recommend this to people who want soft sci-fi and slow reads that focus on the characters.

I really enjoyed Camp Zero. I loved the strong women depicted in this dystopian tale set in Canada. The world-building wasn't hard to follow either.

Maybe I'll try this again in the future but this was one of the rare exceptions where I didn't like the dual narration. I was really looking forward to this one due to the fantastic cover and intriguing premise so I'm disappointed.

Occasionally you just run into a book that is not right for you. It doesn't mean the book is bad, poorly written, or something for others to avoid - it just means this was not the title for you. Which is why I am surprised that I didn't like Camp Zero more. It is everything I usually like: Sci-fi/Fantasy and dystopian. However, I felt, and maybe this is just the male point of view, that this was (at least a little bit) of an attack on the male gender. Because of this I really didn't have any connection to the characters. I suggest you try it, many others love it, it just wasn't the right fit for me.

This started off a little shaky as the various factions and characters are introduced. I am glad I kept reading because the story starts to unfold and the interactions make sense. The blooms were my favorite feature as their story unfolds captures the vulnerability and strength of women.. Strong women are depicted and they are resilient as natural resources in a future world are depleted.A good read with some plausible elements.

Copy provided by the publisher and Net Galley

A beautiful story that mixes Canadian history and tragedies with a dystopian future. The US has become uninhabitable through global warming and a group of Americans flee to Canada, where they will attempt to set up camp and eventually force their way into indigenous lands. North of them is a group of women who have been living off the grid for almost 3 decades, just trying to survive by any means that they can.

This book felt like the movie Martian, but on earth. With some additional similarities to the Hunger Games, in that there is the Floating City (similar to the Capitol) where the elite live and enjoy the delicacies of life while the rest of the planet suffers.

This is a story about power, greed, strength, and survival.

I really wanted to like this novel. The writing is very good and the storyline is one that interests me. These days, any post-apocalyptic writing feels like realism! There are several stories being followed in this book and I really liked how they merged in the end. I wasn't expecting it until the end. That said, I felt like I kept waiting for the story to begin. Because of the structure, I never felt like I got deep enough into any of the characters. The characters themselves, I also liked. I craved more. It wasn't until the last quarter of the book that I felt it had much momentum. I would check out other writing from this author however.

This book really started out with so much potential - addressing the climate crisis, severe wealth inequality - all with a really great feminist premise. Also, the writing is good and really draws the reader in. There was a lot of squandered potential, unfortunately. For instance, why was the pillaging of native lands essentially glossed over? I think it got one or two mentions. And one of the main characters - Grant - felt like an afterthought, a "poor me White boy" trying to atone for the sins of the father. Overall, I'm giving it 3 stars for the overall theme of women doing it for themselves despite the shortcomings.

Told in the same vein as The Light Pirate, Camp Zero is an environmental dystopian novel told in three stories that eventually find themselves intertwined. The planet has become unbearably hot in many former habitable regions and the weather has become deadly. Rose arrives in northern Canada as a “Bloom”, one of several women hired to serve the important men of a new dig site. She is there to extract information so she can eventually return to her mother and be able to provide her with a comfortable life, far from the climate disaster she currently lives in. Grant comes from a wealthy family with a distinguished lineage. Hoping to escape his family name, he agrees to a teaching job in the north, but when he arrives, he realizes it’s not so easy to escape who he is. White Alice is a research center seemingly at the top of the world. When an all-female crew arrive, they form an unbreakable bond of women who will do what is necessary to survive. I found the storyline to be unique but the execution felt somewhat slow and I had a hard time wanting to keep reading. The ending was actually the best as I think the author did a wonderful job of tying all the stories together.

A super cool book with interesting characters and complicated but likeable characters.

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this book in exchange for an honest review!!

Camp Zero focuses on a world that has been hit by very real climate activity, leaving survivors displaced with limited resources. Our main characters, Rose and Grant, come from very different backgrounds and have experienced very different results from climate change. I loved that Sterling chose to deliver the story through both of their eyes. The reader is able to get to know both of their backgrounds and witness their reactions to life at Camp Zero. Rose’s sections were stronger in my opinion, as I found her story to be very compelling and I wanted to root for her throughout.

In addition to these narrators, the reader is given passages from White Alice, a group of female soldiers living and working at a research station. I had no idea at first what these sections had to do with the story, but I loved how Sterling brought everything together at the end.

The pacing to Camp Zero falls in the mid-range for me with certain scenes adding more tension than others. There is a lot of great backstory provided by Sterling that brings Earth’s current living situation to life brilliantly. The ending definitely picks up quite a lot and I was very worried about what would happen to all of the characters I had grown attached to.

If you’re looking for a climate fiction read for your TBR, Camp Zero is a great option!

A huge thank you to Atria Books for my gifted copy!

For an honest review, I received an ARC.

It took a while to get all the pieces together and then there were more pieces added. This is kind of a quarky, dystopian world with other real world situations. It is definitely one to pay attention to make sure you get all the pieces.

While I don't even know if I can summarize the story some of the pieces are: a North Korean migrant, the son of a famous professor escaping notoriety, strict hierarchy with very prescribed roles, a baby born who belongs to everyone.....see, a little quarky.

I don't think this is for everyone but some will enjoy it. I will recommend it to particular people but not everyone.

If Station Eleven and The Handmaid’s Tale had a book baby it would be Camp Zero. I loved it! With our own world on the brink of massive changes because of climate change, the prescient nature of Camp Zero is chilling!

This book gives a harrowing look at a near future where the world is ravished by climate change. Sadly, I find the way things play out entirely believable because I've seen too much of the world's true nature since the pandemic and the way things are going since. It's told from multiple perspectives with all the narratives converging in the end as their lives intersect. I found the tone sad and remorseful at times but with the ever slightest bit of hope. "The world we had left behind, however spiteful and horrific, was still the world."

Camp zero was one of my most highly anticipated books this year and I was SO excited to receive an ebook ARC copy to review. Climate fiction is usually a slam dunk for me, and the comparisons to Station Eleven, one of my all time favorites, was icing on the cake. Unfortunately, I had the hardest time getting into this one. The storylines were so disconnected from one another and I just wasn't invested enough to keep reading to find out if and how they ultimately come together. I ended up DNFing this one as it just didn't work for me

This is such a unique storyline that really drew me in and I was excited to pick it up! While the writing wasn't for me, I think everyone should give this book a chance to see if it's for you! I think fans of dystopians related to climate change should pick this up, it might be right up your alley. I don't understand why so many readers are giving this book such horrible ratings, the author had a unique storyline that really hasn't been done before.

This was a pretty solid book, but I will say that I was more engaged with the first half than the second. The social commentary on climate change and the integration of technology into our daily lives is definitely something that is relevant in the real world and I appreciate the author’s examination of those issues.

I enjoyed how the plot was structured and trying to figure out how our three different perspectives were connected. But the varying timelines and perspective shifts made it very important to pay close attention to what was going on so I didn’t get lost or confused.

Thank you to NetGalley, Atria Books, and Michelle Min Sterling for the e-arc of Camp Zero in exchange for an honest review.

I’m in the minority here but I just can’t get into this book. I don’t know if it’s the writing or the pacing but something is definitely off. Life is too short to read something I can’t enjoy at least a little bit. This one is a thumbs down for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for providing a digital copy in return for an honest, unbiased review.

This book had such beautiful writing but lacked an exciting plot. I thought this was going to be a more thrilling tale but instead it just lackluster. I mean the fact the world is so grim and dark, that all of humanity has lost touch with literature and learning but the main characters just happen to all love books and understand it's power felt a bit too fake to me. Sadly, this book tried so hard to be gritty and dark, but everything ended up feeling meh.

I had high hopes for this book, especially with the Canadian dystopian future setting and the diverse cast of characters. (It had me thinking back and hoping to one of my favorite and sadly discontinued series, Zero Repeat Forever/Cold Falling White by G. S. Prendergast). Unfortunately, this book drew me in in the first half, but just didn't deliver. It was definitely readable and pulled me along, but it felt incomplete in terms of the breadth/depth it achieved by the end. I am fine with multiple POVs, but here I felt it held the story back (unless the book was going to be longer). The representation wasn't what I had thought it would be, either: as another reviewer pointed out, there's no First Nations character, which felt weird in the context of this book, and there's lots of talk about colonization and social issues but not much of a deep dive. The worst for me was that we were stuck with a really annoying POV character who is a rich white boy and whose "tragic past" we seem to be meant to feel sorry for, but we come to learn it's just completely avoidable harm he did to his former girlfriend. I also had a hard time seeing the point of the entire subplot with the off-the-grid and violent "feminist" commune characters, known as "White Alice." By the end, a lot of things had happened, but I was left wondering about the larger point(s), and I was left feeling ambivalent about most of the characters.
I'd like to see more books take on similar settings and themes, and would be interested to see this author develop more as a writer, but ultimately I don't think I'll be recommending this book.
Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for providing an ARC for review.