A year ago I quit my teaching job and began a new adventure working from home. There have been many challenges about this shift in working environment that I have had to learn to deal with, the biggest being controlling my own schedule. You see school is very structured, you follow a timetable just like the kids you teach, and working from home meant my ADHD brain could get as distracted as it wanted because there is no timetable or room full of kids to tell me otherwise. But I am proud to say that I have reigned in my short attention span and adjusted well to being the master of my own schedule. That is until about 4 chapters into this book and all I can say is, thank you Nikki Brooke for giving my ADHD brain the control to focus on nothing else but this book, cause it just had to know what happened next.
Plagued Lands follows Martina Monslave, a bubble washer who is doing everything she can to earn a living to look after her little brother. Martina like the rest of the world’s population is a resident of a world that has been ravaged by disease, forcing humans to live in bio-domes or bubbles so that they are not killed by whatever new virus is spreading in the outside world. Luckily, there is a very fancy pharmaceutical company that is able to create medication to help keep everyone in the bubble cities healthy, for a price. Even though the medicines are expensive and leave Martina and her brother with barely enough money to survive, they don’t have a choice, nobody can survive without the medication, outside the bubbled cities. Or can they?
Nikki does a wonderful job of building a world that you can’t help but be sucked into. A world that is vivid, relatable and believable. She makes it so easy to care for and relate to all the characters, who aren’t just 2 dimensional and generic, but complex. And keeps you invested in what is going to happen to all of them, especially when there is no clear right way to achieve the end goal.
On the surface this is just an adventure story, but the more into the story you get the more it has the ability to make you question what would you really do for the people you love, how far would you go and do the ends justify the means.
While the ending of this book was not at all what I expected or what I was hoping would happen (I’m a sucker for a plain old traditional happy ending), it still feels like the right ending for the book and the characters. It also leaves me wondering about the choices we all face; the greater good or personal quest, bubbled safety or danger-filled freedom, focus on your work or read another chapter.
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