A review by antimony
Survivor Song by Paul Tremblay

dark emotional tense
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot

4.0

it is friday morning. i go to the library to pick up my hold. i have 1 week left before i have to return to college. since the hold i have to pick up is adult fiction, i decide i can get 1 more book if it is also adult and 2 more if they are middle grade or ya. i don't want to still be reading a library book when it is time to leave. so i pick up my hold and then i stumble across survivor song, which i remember looking at in the bookstore a year ago. it seems like a good choice. 

it is now saturday morning. i have already finished the first book that i checked out (mister magic by kiersten white). the weather is lovely and all i want to do is sit outside and read. i read the entirety of survivor song by saturday afternoon. i still have a week left before i go back to school and no more library books.

despite the fact that 1. i dont really like zombies but i keep picking up zombie books anyway 2. im so sooo scared of rabies i decided that this was the right book to read for my last week at home. for a little while i felt like this book might be 3 stars for the aforementioned fact that i don't like zombies (because my rating system is one hundred percent subjective) but the last part was really good and i cried in the epilogue.
for a second there before the epilogue i thought EVERYONE, natalie and ramola and the baby died and i kind of had to sit in shock like he would not do that. he really killed EVERYONE????? but then the epilogue made me feel a bit better. and then i cried at it.
i still kind of don't get why there was like a prelude/prolouge? it could have just been a normal chapter 1. it ended and directly went to chapter 1. but whatever. i also really liked the note in the epilogue that
pretty much within a couple weeks everything was contained and massachusetts went back to normal. i thought that was interesting and kind of sad in a poignant way because it's like there's this horrible apocalyptic event and a couple weeks of hell and countless people die and then all of the sudden things are normal again. or at least they're healing and the virus is mostly gone and the world didn't end. but everything changed so sharply within like one month.


also i cannot believe this was written before covid....i cant help but wonder. if he had started it like 6 months later would it be the same book? like there's one doctor (i forget her name sorry) who says that if everyone follows quarantines well this will all blow over in a couple of weeks
and then the end proves that it does
but with covid (which granted has a MUCH longer lifespan than the rabies virus in this book) that so very much did not happen....and i suppose since he was editing during lockdown presumably he could have changed that if he wanted to since it is kind of a small detail but i don't know. i still wonder.
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