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Wake Me After the Apocalypse
Jordan Rivet, author
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.
Reviews
Rivet’s postapocalyptic thriller stars resourceful 18-year-old Joanna Murphy, who wakes after the world has ended to find herself abandoned due to a cryogenic mishap. Split into two intertwined, interspersed halves—the “Before” and “After” of a world impacted by a foreseen but indestructible comet nicknamed “Brandon”—the narrative unveils dark mysteries about Joanna’s past as an attendee of “Apocalypse Camp,” a program run by the United States Bunker Reservation Project (BRP). Though ostensibly saving people from oncoming doom, the BRP and its intentions are questionable, raising prescient concerns about who gets to choose an apocalypse’s survivors. Despite Joanna and her close-knit team’s intense preparations, when she wakes alone it becomes clear something is wrong, and Joanna’s processes and training protocols are subsequently conveyed in vivid detail. While the tone can be uneven, the novel nevertheless successfully entertains readers with clear, effortless prose and compelling characters. Reliant on heavy foreshadowing and some predictable plot twists, this book provides moments both creepy and suspenseful, offering surprising turns concerning Joanna’s “Before” romance and how humankind learns to cooperate when placed in situations of survival. Ages 15–up. (Self-published.)