January 29, 2035. That’s the day the comet is scheduled to hit—the big one. Denise and her mother and sister, Iris, have been assigned to a temporary shelter outside their hometown of Amsterdam to wait out the blast, but Iris is nowhere to be found, and at the rate Denise’s drug-addicted mother is going, they’ll never reach the shelter in time. A last-minute meeting leads them to something better than a temporary shelter—a generation ship, scheduled to leave Earth behind to colonize new worlds after the comet hits. But everyone on the ship has been chosen because of their usefulness. Denise is autistic and fears that she’ll never be allowed to stay. Can she obtain a spot before the ship takes flight? What about her mother and sister? When the future of the human race is at stake, whose lives matter most?
Available from Amazon On the Edge of Gone.
I have been raving about this book to anyone who will listen to me ever since I read it. I read it in a day. I couldn’t put it down (until the moment I had to put it down because of overwhelm, but we’ll get to that soon).
I love good science fiction, and this is definitely good science fiction. Talking on twitter, someone asked if it’s like a disaster movie, and I suppose a little bit it is – the end of the world is going to be a bit that way isn’t it? But at the same time, the focus is on the people, and that to me lifts this to something a bit more special. Denise is autistic, it says in the blurb, but while she is the feature, her autism isn’t actually the focus, if that makes any sense. For me it was just awesome reading someone who so obviously gets me, and hoping that that means a few others might get a bit of an insight into my world. But, if it were possible to take that aspect of the book out of it, (except you can’t, any more than you can take autism out of an autistic person) the story telling in this would stand alone.
I’ve got a bad feeling I’m not expressing myself well. This isn’t a book about autism, it’s a fully featured science fiction ripping yarn. With autism and diversity running through it in just the same way they run through humanity.
There, does that express it?
Read this book. Please. Because it’s brilliant, *and* you might learn something in the process.
Disclosure – I received a copy of this book direct from the publishers for review.
Midlife Singlemum says
Very interesting ans coincidental as I recently reviewed a YA novel by Keren David, also set in Amsterdam. The thing about the novel I read was that the characters happened to be Jewish but it was not a novel about being Jewish at all. The story was the story and it could have been about anyone, so I know exactly what you mean.
Jax Blunt says
Ooh, I’ll look that up, thanks.