NOT ALONE

After a brutal climate apocalypse, a young mother undertakes an odyssey.

It's been five years since most of the Earth’s population was killed by a “plastic dust storm,” a disaster that threw microplastics from the oceans straight into human lungs. Katie survives in a suburb of London, foraging for berries and roots and trapping stray cats. Harry, her young son, has never left their apartment (Outside is alien enough to warrant a capital O). But Katie’s lungs are failing, and when she finds a hidden letter from the fiance she'd assumed to be dead, she takes Harry on a journey that will lead them to the northern reaches of Scotland. She hopes her fiance, a military veteran named Jack, can raise Harry after she, too, succumbs to the dust. Many of the survivors she meets along the way are menacing, and she struggles to trust even those who deserve it, like Andy and Sue, an older couple who have taken up together after losing their families in the storm. Leaving aside the plausibility of death by microplastics, many of Katie’s concerns seem contemporary. Characters wonder whether it's safe to leave their homes and lecture each other over wearing face masks. Katie’s struggle to be a good mother, especially in a catastrophe, is poignant. But Harry, until the novel’s final act, exists mostly to regurgitate Katie’s anxieties back at her. “Why didn’t you sleep with me?” he asks after an overnight foraging expedition. “What if I couldn’t wake up and I needed you?” Much of the novel is similarly overdetermined; a flashback to a precatastrophe self-defense class leads directly into a scene where Katie must put those skills to use. Jackson's debut novel is stronger when it's surprising, as in the scenes where Katie muses on the strange beauty of the new world.

The themes strain under too much emotional exposition.