And Then I Woke Up

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Devlin uses this setup as an interesting way to reflect mass hysteria and the ideological divides that are running rampant across the world.

The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. And the measurement of those 60 seconds can still take the same amount of objective time while still seeming to be of different duration on the opposite sides of that door. Devlin has produced a novella that is both entertaining and has something to say about the state of the modern, media driven world. The timeline is not always linear and explores other versions of what happened, complicating and simplifying the story elements all at once. Society breaks down, looters run rampant, and the news channels and social media portray a world gone mad.We were directly referred to, as were they and their insights were welcomed as though we were all seated together and listening to this tale read aloud. Escape Rating B+: I’ll admit that I wanted an unequivocal ending to this, where the point-of-view character does finally wake up, take the red pill or the blue pill, and learn what is real.

I wonder if Devlin was perhaps also speaking about addiction and how it blurs the lines of reality to help one to cope with living.Self-assurance proves to be a hard destination to walk back to, and the misinformation and mob mentality he tries to navigate feel incredibly relevant to the world we are living in now. The idea is to confuse the reader with unreliable narrators, fear, uncertainty, maybe monsters (but maybe not), and mass hysteria, but also survivors coming out on the other side. I was hoping for more of the enigmatic weirdness of Devlin’s best stories (such as ‘Songs Like They Used to Play’), but the style is more commercial than that. This was a fascinating zombie novel that led to a cool chat with my twelve-year-old about the common experience of feeling like you're in a movie, especially if there's music playing, and whether or not we'd be someone else's believer. Horror elements to be sure, but definitely more about the idea what sometimes we mean well, but end up doing horrible things – and how the hell do we deal with that and remain sane?