Ruin's Wake
Jan. 13th, 2025 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearRuin's Wake by Patrick Edwards was in a mystery book box I got as a Christmas present - and I had quite a few issues with it.
It's a sci-fi about a post-apocalyptic world that has devolved into a totalitarian dictatorship, where the world at large knows very little about pre-Ruin history and a lot of the technology of the past has been lost.
We follow two main protagonists - an ex-soldier who is trying to find and rescue his injured son, and an abused military wife who risks everything for an illicit affair. There are also journal entries from a researcher exploring an arctic site that might hold answers about the time before the Ruin.
I found it hard to get a handle on the story or the characters to begin with. I also wasn't sure how I felt about a male author writing the perspective of a woman trapped in an abusive marriage - I don't know quite why it made me uncomfortable, but it did.
The book is also pretty grim in places and all three stories felt quite dreary for most of the first half, in which very little actually happens.
It did pick up quite a bit in the second half but it still took far too long for the stories to inter-connect (pg 300). That said, how the characters came together was very clever, even if the convergence felt abrupt.
Then it all descended into wibbly nonsense that was both enraging and utterly ridiculous and I initially very unhappy about what happened to the female protagonist. Up until the very end, it felt like the presentation and treatment of women in the book was pretty terribly - but then they really came into their own in the last few pages and the emotions hit hard.
So, while I can't say I thought this was a particularly good book overall, it's another one where I thought about giving up on it multiple times, but I ended up being really glad I saw it through because the ultimate conclusion brought it all together quite well.
It's a sci-fi about a post-apocalyptic world that has devolved into a totalitarian dictatorship, where the world at large knows very little about pre-Ruin history and a lot of the technology of the past has been lost.
We follow two main protagonists - an ex-soldier who is trying to find and rescue his injured son, and an abused military wife who risks everything for an illicit affair. There are also journal entries from a researcher exploring an arctic site that might hold answers about the time before the Ruin.
I found it hard to get a handle on the story or the characters to begin with. I also wasn't sure how I felt about a male author writing the perspective of a woman trapped in an abusive marriage - I don't know quite why it made me uncomfortable, but it did.
The book is also pretty grim in places and all three stories felt quite dreary for most of the first half, in which very little actually happens.
It did pick up quite a bit in the second half but it still took far too long for the stories to inter-connect (pg 300). That said, how the characters came together was very clever, even if the convergence felt abrupt.
Then it all descended into wibbly nonsense that was both enraging and utterly ridiculous and I initially very unhappy about what happened to the female protagonist. Up until the very end, it felt like the presentation and treatment of women in the book was pretty terribly - but then they really came into their own in the last few pages and the emotions hit hard.
So, while I can't say I thought this was a particularly good book overall, it's another one where I thought about giving up on it multiple times, but I ended up being really glad I saw it through because the ultimate conclusion brought it all together quite well.
