I could not put this book down! I loved all the characters and truly cared what happened to them. I loved how this story drew everyone together and appreciated all the hard choices everyone had to make. This fast pace and heart warming story shows us a great slice of humanity.

YA Station Eleven meets Recursion is probably the most concise way I can describe this book. It’s beautifully written with characters that grab onto your heart, with a more lyrical, meandering storytelling style.

The plot did lose me a bit somewhere around the 50% mark but I could feel the payoff coming and the last 10% was well worth the journey. Did I fully understand it? No. But I’m okay with that.

“The earth is 4.54 billion years old,” said Kit. “Humans have been around for 200,000 years. The planet could blink and miss us. Our extinction would be a return to the status quo.”

Electric Kingdom by David Arnold is a bit of a mind-bender and I admit, there’s a few chapters that I went back to reread just to make sure I was understanding it correctly. This is a book that I’ll be reflecting on and thinking about for quite some time.

The entire world construct that Mr. Arnold developed is both beautiful and tragic, his writing is gorgeous and insightful, deep and meaningful. The setting is in a post-apocalyptic world with only a smattering of people left behind after a devastating Fly Flu/killer flies devastated the world. One of these people and the main narrator is Nico, she and her dog, Harry travel from their farmhouse, away from her rapidly declining father and recently deceased mother to find a portal that she thought was only a fairytale. Along her journey she meets friends, each with a story of their own but strangely interwoven. The Fly Flu that began the apocalypse is pretty terrifying, especially in light of recent events – pandemics and killer wasps – so yeah, there’s a realistic feel to what could potentially happen. There are some huge twists in the story and this is where the mind-bending comes in. It’s done cleverly and in a way that left me feeling incredibly sad yet strangely hopeful, too.

Mr. Arnold illustrates the beauty of human nature; the potential and ability of most people to step up and care for others in the toughest of times which gave the story an extraordinary quality. There’s a uniqueness and originality to this story which really resonated with me. It’s quite unlike anything I’ve read before; making it really hard to put down and leading to some late-night page-turning and binge reading when I should have been doing other things - SOML.

Electric Kingdom has introduced me to a new author and I’ll be picking up whatever he writes. I’d recommend this to any fan of science fiction, dystopian fiction or young adult fantasy.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read an ARC of this book!

I really wanted to like it, since it got a lot of good reviews, and I generally like plague apocalypse books. However, it took me a while to get into the story, and honestly, not a lot happened in the plot. Sure, there are some deaths, as would be expected in this kind of book, but mostly it was just a bunch of kids wandering around for most of the book. I also felt the book suffered from too many perspectives, and it would have been better if it had all been told from Nico's perspective. I liked Kit's perspective as well, but I felt like it didn't add anything to this particular story, and it felt like the author was trying to do multiple perspectives just because that is sort of expected in this kind of book, but not because it actually made sense in the story he was trying to tell. The parts told from the perspective of the Deliverer were kind of interesting, but the tone of them was so different from the rest of the story that they were a bit jarring.

All in all, there were some interesting ideas here, but I don't think the story was told well at all. I couldn't connect with any of the characters besides Nico, and even Nico could have been developed better. Unfortunately, this one was a miss for me.

This story gets into your head and doesn’t let go. I was thinking about it all day after finishing it. It’s unlike anything I’ve read before.

This story follows three points of view: a close third on Nico, a teenage girl; a close third on Kit, a twelve year old boy; and a first person narration of the Deliverer, a mysterious figure. I liked Nico's sections, and was intrigued, if not fully invested, in the Deliverer's. However, I found that KIt's sections really made the book drag and didn't quite fit with the story. I feel like the entire book would have flowed more smoothly if it had primarily been narrated by Nico with interludes from the Deliverer.

I think we were meant to find Kit wise, older than his age, but I mostly just found him annoying. He had a way of speaking about the pre-fly times like they were centuries ago despite it being clear that his mother was alive during this time; the story takes place less than 20 years after the swarms started. For example, he refers to money as "cash bucks," but why wouldn't Dakota have just told him that people didn't say that? He talks about "people of old," but again, certainly his mother didn't talk about people from her own life that way, so where did he pick it up from? It just seemed really out of touch, and we don't see that language at all from anyone else.

I really wish I'd liked this book. There were some aspects of it I thought were really interesting. It just felt unnecessarily long and it took me probably two thirds of the book to actually care what would happen. Overall, I found the story had some good ideas but was ultimately unsatisfying.