After The Ending by by Lindsey Fairleigh and Lindsey Pogue

When people started getting sick, “they” thought it was just the flu. My roommate, my boyfriend, my family…they’re all gone now. I got sick too. I should have died with them—with the rest of the world—but I didn’t. I thought witnessing the human population almost disappear off the face of the earth was the craziest thing I’d ever experience. I was so wrong. My name is Dani O’Connor, I’m twenty-six-years-old, and I survived The Ending.

The Virus changed everything. The world I knew is gone, and life is backwards. We’ve all had to start over. I’ve been stripped of my home, my dreams…all that is me. I’m someone else now—broken and changed. Other survivors’ memories and emotions haunt me. They invade my mind until I can no longer separate them from my own. I won’t let them consume me. I can’t. My name is Zoe Cartwright, I’m twenty-six-years-old, and I survived The Ending.

We’ve been inseparable for most of our lives, and now our friendship is all we have left. The aftermath of the Virus has stranded us on opposite sides of the United States. Trusting strangers, making sacrifices, killing—we’ll do anything to reach one another. Fear and pain may be unavoidable, but we’re strong…we’re survivors. But to continue surviving in this unfamiliar world plagued by Crazies and strange new abilities, we have to adapt. We have to evolve.

And more than anything, we have to find each other.

I seem to be having a bout of bad luck with my fiction choices, especially in the post-apocalyptic genre. This one sounded like a quick-paced, action-filled thriller and ended up as one of the slowest books I’ve read so far this year.

There’s just no way of sugar-coating it: the writing is bad. Cringe-worthy bad. There are not only basic grammatical issues but also stylistic ones that make most readers want to fling the book away. There is too much “telling” instead of “showing” and this gets in the way of the already diluted plot. Add to that characters who are so underdeveloped you can interchange them or meld them into one and still have basically the same book, and you have one dull read.

Zoe and Dani, the two protagonists, are suddenly thrust into this post-apocalyptic world that is never really completely explained. Yes, there is a virus that takes out most of the population, but we don’t really get much about it, not even through flashbacks. But never mind that. What was most disconcerting about the two of them was that although society had crumbled around them, these two women were more interested in getting *pardon the expression* laid than anything else. The amount of time spent obsession over one man or another was absolutely ludicrous. And that’s not even the worst part about it: one of them actually loses a husband to the disease yet seems to completely forget him as she drools over another guy.

I’m not going to go on and on about it because it’s not worth it. Steer clear of this book. It will make you cringe.