Meridian 144 - Softcover

Files, Meg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0939149877 ISBN 13: 9780939149872

Publisher: Soho Pr Inc, 1993

Synopsis

While scuba diving on a sunken warship, Kit and her companion are trapped underwater after a nuclear bomb strikes the harbor of their Pacific island home

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

In the tradition of visionary, end-of-the-world novels, Files's debut rates low, as a woman survives a nuclear holocaust only to spend the rest of her time on earth contemplating her botched-up love life. The time is now, the place is a Pacific island something like Guam that's divided up arbitrarily among the natives, Japanese tourists, and the US military. Catherine Manning, a schoolteacher recently escaped from a joyless marriage and neurotic urban lifestyle on the US mainland, is scuba-diving off the coast with her current beau, an Air Force captain, when there's a sudden flash of light, an earthquake-like shudder, and an eruption of underwater debris. The captain is killed, and when a panicky Catherine, gulping mouthfuls of bottled oxygen, emerges from the watery depths, it is to find a world decimated by nuclear war. While repairing to the local dive shop to stockpile more bottles of uncontaminated air, releasing her dog from the island's quarantine pen (where it has miraculously survived), and scouring the island for packaged food, decent shelter and other survivors, Catherine begins to turn her thoughts inexplicably to the cindered remains of her own love life. Descriptions of her anxiety-ridden childhood, her unhappy marriage, and a series of sordid extramarital affairs are not only interspersed quite awkwardly with vivid evocations of a post-holocaust world and of violent confrontations with other survivors, but they're given equal weight--a decision that would be funny if it weren't so depressing. In the end, Catherine manages to join a group of ``good'' survivors to try to carry on the human race--though the reader, chilled to the bone by Catherine's phenomenal narcissism, may wonder why they bother. An oddity--cheerless and somber, with all the trappings and none of the import of literary profundity. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

YA-- World War III is the backdrop for this tale that combines Robinson Crusoe with a recasting of the Genesis story. Kitty Manning proves to be an Eve of the '90s as she survives nuclear disaster, escaped convicts, religious fanaticism, a typhoon, and, ultimately, her own past. Through a developing sense of self-redemption, her new clear-headedness enables her to defeat evil, rescue a possible Adam, and take the first hesitant steps that might create a second Eden on a South Pacific island. Through the liberal use of flashbacks, Files reconstructs her heroine's past life. While not dwelling on the causes of the war, she gives a nod to the realities of post-Soviet international politics by having the destruction stem from nuclear weapons in the hands of unstable Middle Eastern nations. The author spares readers technodrama and political polemics, however, in favor of one woman's life and struggle to endure. Unlike previous entries in the end-of-life-as-we-know-it genre, this story ends with a glimmer of realistic hope. Grisly and poetic in turn, it should appeal to mature, thoughtful, and sensitive YAs.
- Carolyn E. Gecan, Thomas Jefferson Sci - Tech, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Soho Pr Inc
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0939149877
• ISBN 13: 9780939149872
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264