The City Where We Once Lived
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Average rating4
15
Ratings1
Average rating4
"In a near future where climate change has severely affected weather and agriculture, the North End of an unnamed city has long been abandoned in favor of the neighboring South End. Aside from the scavengers steadily stripping the empty city to its bones, only a few thousand people remain, content to live quietly among the crumbling metropolis. Many, like the narrator, are there to try to escape the demons of their past. He spends his time observing and recording the decay around him, attempting to bury memories of what he has lost. But it eventually becomes clear that things are unraveling elsewhere as well, as strangers, violent and desperate alike, begin to appear in the North End, spreading word of social and political deterioration in the South End and beyond. Faced with a growing disruption to his isolated life, the narrator discovers within himself a surprising need to resist losing the home he has created in this empty place. He and the rest of the citizens of the North End must choose whether to face outsiders as invaders or welcome them as neighbors."--Jacket flap.
Series
1 primary bookThe City Where We Once Lived is a 1-book series first released in 2018 with contributions by Eric Barnes.
Reviews with the most likes.
I'm deeply conflicted about this book and if I'd recommend it to someone else or not.
Beneath the surface here, there's a story about a man deeply conflicted after the death of his family. Our unnamed protagonist, or, “the writer,” confines himself to a literal purgatory within a decaying city in an abandoned hotel overlooking this dead city.
When faced with signs of life and rebirth, he turns inward, although he's bound by his duty as the city's lone reporter to document what he sees. From a woman and child, a politician, a gardener and other signs of life in a place he'd confined himself to under the idea of withering away with it until his demise, it's difficult to not see glimmers of hope through the dried chaparral.
Whatever the catastrophe facing this city and the world at large are remain unexplained, vague and at times, eye-roll-worthy with how blunt they are, metaphorically. Even as someone who agrees humanity has irrevocably damaged the planet and we're cruising towards climate disaster while refusing to take our collective foot off the gas for long enough to consider the outcome, it felt clumsy and forced.
This was a world that couldn't see beyond what it knew and never considered anything else. An apocalypse in slow-motion that got close to saying something about how to deal with it, but seemed gun shy.
The changes and growth of the lead character are subtle, so subtle they can easily be missed, but they are there. The plot doesn't have insurmountable odds to overcome and there's no hero. That's okay. There's no great awakening in our writer, or change of heart, just, like I said, a glimmer of hope he might change while the people around him are the ones moving in the positive direction.
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