I was very excited to read this book, as I joined The End of the World Book Reading Club, and this was my first box with the book and several small gifts to open throughout the book…all of which I thought was a pretty awesome idea.
When I read the blurb on the back of the book, I was immediately intrigued. The idea of an alien invasion and people having to travel to Antarctica to survive immediately caught my attention…and I actually really liked the beginning of the book. I really enjoyed viewing the first sighting of Antarctica through the eyes of Ui, a man from two thousand years ago with no knowledge of science, or technology. I especially liked the visual of the ice blocks as clouds, either falling from the sky into the water, or rising up from the water to become clouds in the sky.
I will say that I’m not really a fan of the instant love connection between two characters, so seeing that between Atto and Liza kind of put me off reading the book a bit. I did like the sudden, abrupt chaos of the alien ships appearing in the sky and giving the deadline to humans about thirty days to reach Antarctica. That definitely gave an air of urgency to the book…and as people attempted to flee the city and get to the airports, I could definitely feel the panic and that sense of trying to save your own family, with nothing left to help any of the others who were in the same, or perhaps worse, situations.
I liked the whole buildup of humans trying to reach Antarctica before the deadline given by the aliens, but I was extremely disappointed by the abrupt timeskip of twenty years once they actually got there. Learning, adapting and surviving to life in the extreme cold would have been a really good way of worldbuilding and character development…and I kind of felt robbed of that by the timeskip. I also found it really hard to have characters introduced in the present day, only to abruptly skip back twenty years to how they handled the alien invasion and got to Antartica. There was a lot of jumping backwards and forwards that made the book hard to read at times.
I also think that the book could have done without the focus on the science experiments. It felt like there were two different ideas/plots going on in this book, but neither were given enough room to develop properly.
On the whole, I couldn’t really engage with this book as much as I would have liked to. There was too much going on and too many random jumps for characters I didn’t get the chance to know. I will say that I loved the gifts I received with the book, and I definitely plan to continue the subscription as long as I can afford to. Hopefully, I will enjoy the next book better!