Aftermath | Tom Lewis

The end of the world came fast. Between the time the warning had sounded on the TV, till when 16-year-old Paige O’Connor awakened sometime later, civilization had been crushed. 

The attacks had come by “them” – those things in the ships in the sky that had appeared suddenly, and without warning. 

And as Paige would soon discover, the attacks had only been the beginning. 

Aftermath is the first book in the new After the Fall dystopian action series, which follows a young girl’s struggle for survival in the wake of civilization’s collapse, and humanity’s domination by an alien race of beings. 

While the concept of this book was interesting, I personally didn't feel as though it was executed as well as it could have been.

My main issue was the lack of interaction the story had with the reader. The audience should have some part in the story. We should be given the opportunity to like characters and dislike characters without outright being told who is good and who is bad. Personally I felt as though this story lacked depth, in the characters, the plot, the setting, etc.

While this book was science fiction and, of course, completely unreal, I still feel like every book should have aspects with some semblance to real life, whether it be manifested in the character personalities, character relations, the events of the book, etc. And I genuinely feel as though this story didn't have any, at least none that I could relate to.

On the same note, I feel as though the dialogue could have been more interesting. It did serve to answer some of the questions we had, but I felt as though most of it was characters asking and answering questions. We got no heartfelt moments between characters that really solidified their relationship, which is why the proclaimed love was hard to believe.

The first book in the series generally sets the foundation and predicts the trajectory for the rest of the series. From The Hunger Games, we knew there would be some efforts put to overthrow the Capitol and from The Fifth Wave Series we can predict that there is some sort of human-alien conspiracy that must be solved. But with this book I really saw no trajectory. I assume they're going to try and overthrow the "hosts", but as the protagonists of the story, they haven't really solidified a plan.

Generally I think the execution of the idea could have been better done. It's an interesting concept told in a very simple way, one I didn't prefer. I like getting as into my books as I can so I didn't enjoy this book as much as I wish I could have, but I don't want to discourage anyone who may be interested in this type of writing.