VANISHING HOUR
Author: Lisa KingSeries: N/A
Source: ARC via Publisher
Publisher: Fiction Studio Books
Publication Date: March 31, 2020
Overall Rating:
Diversity Rating:
Summary:
Seventy-year-old Matthew Werner, who suffers from a debilitating case of Not Normal, doesn't know that nearly everyone on earth has died. He only knows that, out in the world, something terrible is happening – something he's not willing to discover. So he barricades himself inside and tries to stay ignorant. That is, until twelve-year-old Ruby Sterling shows up at his doorstep, all alone.
The two have little in common. Matthew is old, strange, grumbly, and concerned only with figuring out what happened to his wife, who went missing months earlier. Ruby is serious, curious, and worried about the fate of her father and whether the future even exists. Neither wants much to do with the other. Which is why, when Ruby hears a voice on the radio telling people to come to a place called the Horizon, she's determined to find it, even if Matthew isn't.
But outside, he's the least of her problems, and she's the least of his. To survive, they must count on the last thing either expected: each other.
And the Horizon? It could be anywhere. Or nowhere at all.
Vanishing Hour is a work of apocalyptic fiction unlike any other. As much a story about the beginning of an unlikely friendship as it is about the end of the world, it resonates on both the personal and social levels. You're not likely to forget this one anytime soon.
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Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book and chose to review it. I was compensated to expedite my review to May. This in no way impacts my opinion.
“She never asked for the sea or the sky, just a tiny shred of wonderful.”
I thought this was an interesting mix of Middle Grade and Adult Science Fiction. I liked seeing those two worlds collide and how this one eventually played out. My biggest complaint really is that it wasn’t given the time it needed to fully develop. I wish this had been broken into a duology so that we could have adequate time understanding the breakdown of society as well as the new “utopia” and hope. We weren’t given enough time for either and there was a rush to tell us what the virus was, which took a bit away from the reading experience. Overall though it was a really interesting look to apocalyptic fiction that had a lot of twists and turns along the way.
I really liked both of our main characters - Matthew and Ruby. I thought they played well off of one another and built up a really good rapport throughout. I liked how they became each other’s family. The book was a really good case of found family and how people can come together and be stronger than they think during a time of crisis.
I thought the plot line was interesting but sometimes it revealed too much too quickly. I would have liked more time to guess about why only certain people were left in the world rather than being told (relatively quickly). I thought it was really interesting and well done but I would have liked it to be more of a surprise or at least some sort of “figuring out.”
I did like the different ways we see society break in this one - first with Centre One and then seeing the world as Matthew and Ruby traveled to what they hoped was a better place. I think there was too much emphasis on how Jud was Bad and Evil and not enough on how there are varying degrees of this and that his mental health obviously played a role. There isn’t really black and white in this scenario but it was portrayed that way.
Overall, I was hoping that this was a longer book than it ended up being because more needed to be explained for the reader to fully encompass the world and everything inside of it. But I thought it was a really interesting take on apocalyptic futures and I definitely recommend it!
