It's a beautiful book about a brutal reality, with a heartbreakingly vulnerable, authentic mother-child relationship at its heart. Katie forages, hunts the surviving animal population, and provides for Harry, who was born after the storm, and who has never left their little home. After years without human contact, Katie and Harry are shocked by the arrival of a threatening newcomer.

Katie ventures out in risky scouting missions for food to ensure their survival, resulting in a chance encounter with a group of survivors putting she and Harry at risk. Now Katie must forage and hunt the few surviving animals for meat as she attempts to feed her little boy, to care for him as best she can. The story unfolds with a mix of flashbacks that provide a few revealing plot twists that kept me interested in how it was going to work out until the very end. Preaching on the challenges of mental illness doesn’t do much good if only the choir can relate or understand what is happening. Would any mother, having found a caring couple to carry on living with, decide to make a life threatening journey to scotland in the faint hope that the man she loves is still alive and she can find him.The day of the storm, Jack had been working at a medical clinic in London, and was separated from Katie. Ok, I got to page 63 and stopped because I could not stand the main character or the way she handles her kid. I found it well written and I flew through it; even though relatively little happens except for the mundane rituals of Katie's and Harry's survival, there are real moments of heart-in-your-throat-action amid some of the more repetitive parts (this is mostly in the dust itself and the mask wearing, which gets repeated over and over). After a huge microplastic storm separated her and her lover and killed countless people, all she knows is how to survive--and resources are depleting.

I also found Katie a sympathetic lead--her struggle to raise a child, especially given the circumstances leading up to and involving his birth, and keep him safe in this new environment, and trying to find a balance in keeping him safe and teaching him how to cope was both heartbreaking and solid. and the atmospheric descriptions of a world wiped out by a microplastic storm place you right in the thick of this dark and terrifying post-apocalyptic setting. We’ve all heard of microplastics, and Jackson expands on this fear even further with nanoparticles small enough to pass through cell walls. I really find it beyond belief that a landcruiser smashed into barricades, houses and regularly submerged and filled with old polluted fuel could make it past the M25.

How an ecological disaster might look, how much we take for granted, and how continuing to damage the world we live in could lead to an unthinkable future. Katie forages while Harry, who was born after the storm and knows nothing of life Before, lives in relative fear of anything outside the confines of their small London flat. Jackson’s dystopian novel wrings the last drops of optimism from our climate-challenged world but manages to distill the very essence of hope in the process. We’re going to need that kind of hopeful grit if we’re to survive our own environmental catastrophe. S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows.

They started to find plastic dust in rivers, soils and even the air – and also in the vast oceans, millions of pieces per square metre, washed there like it was a great big watery garbage dump. But there’s also a sense of adventure to it, as well as love throughout it and hope at the end of it. Bodies continue to build up around them, inescapable layers of toxic dust hang heavily in the air and Katie is only getting sicker. North America was ravaged by the storm, and the toxic dust damages infrastructure, but otherwise Katie is unaware. Years after a mocroplastic mega storm killed much of the population, we meet Katie, surviving in an apartment with her son Harry, who has never known a world other than the current state it is in.On top of the bleakness, the portrayal of trauma after rape is also fantastic, but it’s too real and I’m terrified to get to the rape scene if I’m already this disturbed by the content. When Jack set-off for the hospital, knowing they’d need him when the storm hit, he had no idea that the storm would define the end of ‘Before’ and yield a post-apocalyptic after.