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- Contents Category: Children's and Young Adult Fiction
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With a stepmother she hates and a father who’s barely there, sixteen-year-old Danby Armstrong knew Christmas Day would be bad, but she wasn’t expecting the apocalypse. While families tear the wrapping off the latest iGadgets and share excited status updates, something strange happens. Suddenly, people are not just reading each other’s thoughts in their news feeds; they’re actually in each other’s heads. Everything from a neighbour’s affair to a planned terrorist attack is suddenly known; ‘the elephants in every room had been set loose to stampede’. Sydney erupts in violence as people seek revenge or just a place to shut out all those voices. But while Danby can hear them, they can’t hear her, and that makes her almost invisible.
- Book 1 Title: The Last Girl
- Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $19.95 pb, 384 pp, 9781743316368
In the aftermath of ‘The Snap’ those who are still alive power down into an eerie, comatose state, many still clinging to their phones and tablets. Danby, confused and terrified, takes her unconscious little brother and heads for the Blue Mountains, where she hopes her mother is still alive. But Danby is not the only one awake, and the other survivors have their own agendas.
Adams’ s criticism of our growing reliance on social media is initially rather didactic and potentially alienating for a readership that has never known life without it. However, he raises some provoking questions about how much of our private life we thoughtlessly share and what would happen if we were unable to unplug.
Being the first of a series, much of The Last Girl is concerned with establishing the post-apocalyptic world, though Danby is a sharp, witty narrator and the pace is fast. The Last Girl has the potential to be for a new generation of readers what John Marsden’s Tomorrow series was in the 1990s.
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