Review: Aftertime by Sophie Littlefield

Aftertime by Sophie Littlefield
Luna (February 2011)
Trade: $14.95
ISBN: 9780373803361

Favorite Lines: “She hadn’t been able to clean herself in days, and she knew she carried the smell. The long hair on the back of her head, the hair she hadn’t pulled out, was knotted and tangled. Her nails were blackened and broken. Real Beaters usually had no nails left, but how could the girl be expected to notice a detail like that?”

Awakening in a bleak landscape as scarred as her body, Cass Dollar vaguely recalls surviving something terrible. Having no idea how many weeks have passed, she slowly realizes the horrifying truth: Ruthie has vanished.

And with her, nearly all of civilization.

Where once-lush hills carried cars and commerce, the roads today see only cannibalistic Beaters—people turned hungry for human flesh by a government experiment gone wrong.

In a broken, barren California, Cass will undergo a harrowing quest to get Ruthie back. Few people trust an outsider, let alone a woman who became a zombie and somehow turned back, but she finds help from an enigmatic outlaw, Smoke. Smoke is her savior, and her safety.

For the Beaters are out there.

And the humans grip at survival with their trigger fingers. Especially when they learn that she and Ruthie have become the most feared, and desired, of weapons in a brave new world….

Aftertime takes a harsh look at the world after the apocalypse. It is a dangerous and deadly place where the smartest people shoot first and ask questions later. It is a world where zombies and disillusionment have been mixed together to build a place where only the strongest survive.

It is not a feel good type of book. There is a moment toward the end of the story that my lips burned with sympathy pains for a character and other moments where I didn’t know if the end was ever going to come. It seems like one problem after another constantly popped up and I’m more than pleased with the way Sophie Littlefield avoided bringing unrealistic closure to the different plot lines. She went hard all the way.

The heroine of the story, Cass, is a damaged, former drug abuser who I found hard to like. Not because of her bad choices during the events of the book, but because her difficult life and the poor life choices she made before the world went psycho caused her to become a person I would never like in reality. But her goal and determination to reach her goal made Cass human to me.

Aftertime is built upon the idea that all people make mistakes…it’s what you do after you realize mistakes have been made that forms determines what kind of person you truly are. There is a light romance thread throughout the book and a constant drive to survive. The groups introduced in the story are vastly different from each other. The most important thing to remember about Aftertime is nobody is who he/she appears to be.

Aftertime is the first book in Littlefield’s series. The next book, Rebirth, will be released in August 2011.

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