Aftermath by Tom Lewis | Book Review

(After the Fall #1)

Published: March 28th 2015

Synopsis:

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.

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My Rating:  3.5/5 (Liked it) | Add on Goodreads

Book Information

Genre(s): Young-adult, dystopia

Page Count: 174

Format: e-book

Buy Links:
Amazon

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Used for the Popsugar challenge: A book with a one-word title

Note: I received a free digital copy of this book thanks to Xpresso Book Tours in exchange for an honest review.

Hi! I’ve read this a while ago (or so it feels like) and I’m finally getting to the review. Woo-hoo! Anyway, without further ado, my review on Aftermath by Tom Lewis.

Quick Summary

Paige’s world is turned upside down when one day, she finds that another race of beings attacks the human population. Now there are people under the control of the beings, and there is no one you can trust. Will Paige be able to survive?

Plot

Ooh, aliens! Truth be told, I haven’t read much alien books, so this was definitely an intriguing plot idea for me! And as far as alien books goes, this wasn’t a bad book. The plot was engaging, interesting and there’s nothing really wrong with it, except for the fact that it was rushed. After all, the book was trying to fit a whole story in just 174 pages. Not exactly going to be a slow story. The plot didn’t fully meet my expectations, but it was still enjoyable. I know this is a very brief idea of my feelings on the plot, but that’s really all there is to it. You know those books where you inexplicably can’t explain much more than a few words? That’s how it is. The plot was good. All I can add to that is it definitely could’ve been amazing had it been less rushed and handled better alongside the characters & writing style.

Characters

This is where the real issues start. I’m pretty sure we all can agree that characters play a huge role in how much you enjoy a book. And in this case, for me, it’s not that I didn’t like the characters; I did. What it really was that I didn’t have enough time to get to know the characters all that well before the action started. As a result when there were moments where I was technically supposed to be mourning along with the character, I kind of felt emotionally detached. As I continued the story, sure, I wanted to know what happens to the characters, but I wasn’t really invested in the characters or their tragedies.

In a closer examination of the main character, Paige, I would say she fell kind of flat of her potential. Had I gotten to know her before the action started, I might’ve liked her a bit more, but as it is, she wasn’t a very interesting character to me. To be honest, at times she also came off as quite 2-dimensional. Sometimes I felt like all I could say to describe her was a size 2 (she pointed it out a one part), good looks, and is great at self-defense and fighting people. See what I mean about 2-dimensional?

That being said, I still did enjoy her enough to care about what happens to her.

Lastly, I just wanted to quickly mention that the other characters were also enjoyable. They seemed kind of stereotypical (the guy who falls in love with the main character, the helpful friend, etc.) but I didn’t dislike them.

The romance in the story, I found to be quite cliché and not that unique, but oh well. I just kind of ignored it, because it didn’t seem that realistic and didn’t affect me that much.

Writing Style

The writing style was decent, however there was this one issue. I found that in several places, sentences that require question marks or exclamation marks had periods instead. Usually if this occurred just a few times, it doesn’t bother me, but I noticed it in many parts in the book, and it disrupted my reading. I’m not sure whether it was only my copy, or if all copies are like that, but in my reading experience I noticed it.

Overall…

This book could’ve been better, but it was still decent. I really liked it while reading it, and even after finishing it I found it to be a good book, but now as I’m writing my full review I realized how many issues there really were that bothered me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a decent read, but I wouldn’t recommend this if you’re looking for a substantial dystopian novel. So all in all, this one’s your pick. If you want a short, simple, dystopian read (most dystopians are quite big!) with aliens, then I would recommend reading this book, but otherwise I wouldn’t say so.

Happy reading!

-A