Far North (2009)

This beautifully written post-apocalyptic tale tends to get lost among the tales of cannibals and zombies, but I would rank it right up there with McCarthy's The Road or Crace's The Pesthouse. One refreshing difference in this novel is that the main character, Makepeace -- sheriff of a dead town -- is a woman. Her trials and travails are harsh, but her will to survive and sense of hope brighten an otherwise dark landscape. ( )

Loved it. Interesting ideas, settings, character, and story. If you are into speculative fiction at all, this is an excellent read. ( )

Powerful book. Powerful, magnificent, but brutal and bleak. Makepeace is one of the most resilient of characters that I have ever come across while reading fiction.

I have noticed that many reviews here give away too much of the plot. I would advice against reading them as the magnificence of this book comes out through Marcel Theroux's ingenious writing. He tells you the story by Makepeace's point of view but everytime Theroux holds something back and reveals it finally in a single sentence as if it was of no consequence whatsoever to start with and we (the reader) would have already guessed that fact by ourselves. Marcel kept surprising me right till the end. And I liked the ending too.

The post-apocalyptic scenario is also very well realized as there are no sword-wielding weirdos which is a major cliché of so many post-apocalyptic novels.

But the thing is, it's bloody brutal, right up there with Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" but with one major difference. Here, punctuation marks have survived the apocalypse. ( )

I liked this. I liked it better than 3 stars, but it didn't quite hit the 4 star mark for me.

It's a first person narrative in a post-apocalyptic landscape. I tend to prefer first person perspectives in PA (and dystopian, which this is assuredly not) because seeing this world through the eyes of someone struggling through it makes it feel stronger much of the time.

There isn't a whole lot of plot, but the descriptions are wonderful and clean. This book is not overly wordy, doesn't have complicated language because it's told from the viewpoint of a survivor. Someone who saw the end of the plentiful times we lived through, but not really (Makepeace's family were living in the frontier of Far North trying to get away from the excesses of the society we live in now).

Makepeace Hatfield is the last of a survivor of a frontier town who ventures out to find something more. The landscape and life is somewhere between [b:The Road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320606344s/6288.jpg|3355573] (not as soul crushing and bleak) and Mad Max (though not quite as violent). The survival parts were interesting. Looking at how people who formerly lived in a time of plenty were faring and seeing how the more "primitive" lifestyles also fared was interesting.

I feel it is, in part, a cautionary tale of where we are heading with our excesses, over-population, and environmental destruction, It's interesting to me that I read this not long after [b:Parable of the Sower|52397|Parable of the Sower|Octavia E. Butler|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312501210s/52397.jpg|59258], which takes place in what you can imagine was going on in the "civilized" lands while this is what's happening in the frontier.

There are a couple of odd turns, and there was even one thing that made me go back in the book to look for what I missed, which was a little jarring, but overall it was pretty decent. ( )

I liked this. I liked it better than 3 stars, but it didn't quite hit the 4 star mark for me.

It's a first person narrative in a post-apocalyptic landscape. I tend to prefer first person perspectives in PA (and dystopian, which this is assuredly not) because seeing this world through the eyes of someone struggling through it makes it feel stronger much of the time.

There isn't a whole lot of plot, but the descriptions are wonderful and clean. This book is not overly wordy, doesn't have complicated language because it's told from the viewpoint of a survivor. Someone who saw the end of the plentiful times we lived through, but not really (Makepeace's family were living in the frontier of Far North trying to get away from the excesses of the society we live in now).

Makepeace Hatfield is the last of a survivor of a frontier town who ventures out to find something more. The landscape and life is somewhere between [b:The Road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320606344s/6288.jpg|3355573] (not as soul crushing and bleak) and Mad Max (though not quite as violent). The survival parts were interesting. Looking at how people who formerly lived in a time of plenty were faring and seeing how the more "primitive" lifestyles also fared was interesting.

I feel it is, in part, a cautionary tale of where we are heading with our excesses, over-population, and environmental destruction, It's interesting to me that I read this not long after [b:Parable of the Sower|52397|Parable of the Sower|Octavia E. Butler|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312501210s/52397.jpg|59258], which takes place in what you can imagine was going on in the "civilized" lands while this is what's happening in the frontier.

There are a couple of odd turns, and there was even one thing that made me go back in the book to look for what I missed, which was a little jarring, but overall it was pretty decent. ( )