Wake Me After The Apocalypse (Bunker #1)
Author: Jordan Rivet
Publisher:
Publication Date: September 14, 2018
Pages: 316
Format: Borrowed/Kindle Unlimited
When a killer comet hurtles for the earth, 18-year-old Joanna Murphy is selected to wait out the apocalypse in an underground bunker. She enters cryosleep with her close-knit team, preparing to resettle the planet after the atmosphere clears in two hundred years.Joanna is the only one who wakes up.Faced with a bunker full of bones and a blocked exit, Joanna must claw her way to the surface, figure out what happened to her team, and try not to panic—or die. That’s going to be tricky if she’s the only person left in the world.From the author of the Lost Clone series, Steel and Fire, and the Seabound Chronicles comes a story of resilience and optimism at the end of the world.
Review: I can always count on a solid post-apocalyptic book to pull me out of a reading slump. I have to give this book credit though. I've been in a slump for about a year and I finished this book in less than two days. This book finally engaged me enough to get me really into a story!
To start off, I will say it was a bit slow going in the beginning. We get a lot of back and forth with our main character Joanna bouncing between the present, when she wakes from cryosleep in the bunker, and before, where we get the whole backstory of the comet headed towards Earth and how she got into the bunker program. This made the beginning slow as we were making slow progress in both parts of the before and present stories. However, the background was needed to fully understand the present and everything that happens in the later half of the book. The author did a great job however of connecting each part though. As we see Joanna adjust and process everything happening to her in the present, we're also given the crucial backstory helping us understand why she feels like she does, why she won't give up, and just how she got to where she is to begin with.
So let me talk about Before. We're tossed into the before part of the story learning that a comet named Brandon will hit Earth and annihilate all living beings currently in 9 months. We then follow Joanna as she adjusts to the new normal of an impending apocalypse. During this time she finds out she's selected for the bunker program in which she will be put in cryosleep for 200 years to help rebuild and repopulate Earth once it's safe again to do so and her family urges her to go so that she can survive and bring their legacy into the future. Officially having joined the program, we then get to experience how she makes a new "family" with others chosen for the program, specifically her team, Blue Team 7. We meet and get close to her team, consisting of Garrett, Blake, Chloe, Ruby, and Vincent, to name a few. Over the course of the months leading up to the comet hitting Earth and their impending cryosleep, we experience the harsh training the team is put through, physically and mentally. As much as it felt like the before part was dragged out some, it really puts into perspective why Joanna is so heartbroken that she's the only one alive that she knows of at the beginning of the book. We see her fall in love with Garrett during their training and make close friends with Ruby even though she hates her blunt honesty. We see this whole mismatched team form into a solid cohesive bunch that really relies on and supports each other. They helped each other with the grief of knowing their families wouldn't survive and for one, even seeing their family end up dead, and just adjusting to knowing that things would not be the same when they woke up in the future. Watching these bonds being built was crucial to us understanding Joanna's grief but also her resilience in the present. Getting the before also helped us piece together the people and the things that were off during the whole impending apocalypse as well. We watch as some of the "leaders," such as Waters, their military man, start to lose their faith in their fellow humans and take matters into their own hands that end up having serious consequences in the future. As much as the beginning was slow, it was necessary for the world-building and character-building.
The present in the first half of the book. It very slowly progressed due to the back and forth with the before chapters, however, as the timelines caught up,, things picked up a significant amount. We start the book with Joanna waking up and coming out of cryosleep. Right from the beginning it is chaos for her as she awakens to find she's semi-trapped in her tank, and once she's finally able to free herself, finding out her bunker was devasted by cave-ins and quakes. As far as she knew, she was the only one alive, as all the other tanks she could access in her half of the bunker had already ceased to function ages ago. We are with her as she comes to terms with being the only survivor, and she decides to persevere and make her way out of the bunker, no matter how terrified she is out of her sheer will to live for all the other lives lost in the bunker, especially those of her team. While I didn't necessarily find her escaping to the surface and all her struggles to get there terrifying or heart-pounding, once she actually got to the surface, it became much more real. She finds a shack house half underground in the mining complex the bunker was in to make her base, and we see her start bringing supplies up and finding a way to move forward with surviving despite being alone. However, once she found out she wasn't alone after the guns went missing during one of her bunker trips, I was right there with her, terrified and wondering just who else was out there with her. I felt her urgency to check the other mineshaft and find out if anyone else survived that much more at that point. I was honestly not expecting who it was when we found out, as my thoughts went the other direction.
*Spoiler Alert*
The present in the second half. Things heavily picked up the pace here and I could not put the book down at this point. After Joanna's shack catches fire, she's rescued and tended to by an unknown settlement of people. Unknown that is, until Garrett himself walks through the door of the cabin she's been taken to to be cared for in. I was right there with Joanna in shock that he had not only survived but had been out of the bunker for almost 20 years at the time of her waking up. Come to find out, a decent-sized group had survived from her bunker, however, when the cave-ins happened, their tanks opened up almost 20 years early and they have been on the surface building a new life since. Garrett, Blake, Vincent, Chloe, and Ruby all survived and were older now. Joanna really didn't know how to feel about the fact they didn't try hard enough to get into her side of the bunker to see if anyone survived and in essence left her behind. Every thought she had about how they were all going to wake up, work together, and she'd get her relationship back were erased. I felt so bad reading her struggling to come to terms with everything. Being left behind, knowing they didn't try hard enough to get to her, and knowing it was Garrett who made the decision to give up on that half of the bunker. Having to see the lives and families they all built without her and having to suffer all her heartbreak and betrayal all at once. I could absolutely feel her pain and understood why she struggled to adjust to being back with others again at this point.
Then, amid all this, we learn that Blake led a splinter group to the Oregon bunker with the aim of becoming their leader since they were awake for so long and experienced already. However, Blake didn't know that what Waters had done in the past with his questionable, secret, shady antics set up this idea to go very badly, then leading to Blake not only coming back having lost some of his men but having also been followed by members from the Oregon bunker and leading to a huge confrontation between our group (the Idaho Bunker as they have been dubbed by others) and the Oregon group. While in the end, Joanna and Chloe, being fast thinking on their feet, found a way to prevent bloodshed and war between the groups, a lot of information comes out. The Oregon bunker members spill the beans about what they were told by the Idaho bunker's former doctor, who escaped before the comet and ended up there. All of Water's shady, distrustful, militaristic actions were outed, and all the other bunkers were told to be on alert for attack as soon as they awoke because they thought the Idaho bunker would be coming for them due to all the crazy, negative actions that happened. While this was news to most of the Idaho members, Garrett let out that he had known before going into cryosleep about all of this, which led to Joanna feeling more out of place than she already did. All of the info that came out in the second half and Joanna's decision in the end to go with the Oregon group back to their bunker to try to fix things set up things nicely for the rest of the books moving forward! I can't wait to keep reading them!
4 Stars!