I absolutely adored the premise based on the blurb and loved the cover, but man the first half of this book felt like nothing really happened and I had a hard time staying focused because I just couldn't be bothered to care. I wasn't interested in some of the characters and their secrets. I also had an issue with the world building which wasn't fully fleshed out. I needed more world building, more explanations to love this one. I do think this book will find an audience of people who enjoy it as reading is subjective, but for personally, it feel a bit flat.

2.5 stars

This was disappointing. The concept was so cool. But somehow this was so incredibly boring, and I just didn't care about the characters or what happened to them.
The first 60% of the book is just characters walking around the train and talking or being a little mysterious. It is very descriptive and it's very easy to picture everything described. The atmosphere is one of a bit of dread, and yet somehow I just wasn't moved to an emotion.
I do think this could easily find an audience that will enjoy it. It just wasn't for me unfortunately.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the preview. All opinions are my own.

⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands was a complex story with interesting characters, a fun premise, and whimsical moments that unfortunately fell flat for me.

Though the idea of the story, the characters, the setting, and the writing were all fantastic, the execution was not for me. I felt like it needed to be longer, and some parts felt like they needed to be faster and others slower. The character development felt odd and I found I couldn’t connect to them or the world. I did really enjoy the writing, though, and there were many whimsically beautiful scenes. The ending was also lovely. It was a fun read, and I would still recommend it to fans of The Night Circus!

The narrator for this one was great! She captured the characters’ voices, personalities, and the feeling of the story really well. I had a great time listening to her performance.

Thank you to the publisher for the free ALC!

Not what I was expected but still a fun and unique journey. You'll see a lot of influences in this one, from authors like Agatha Christie, Jeff VanderMeer, and Leigh Bardugo, but Brooks makes her world unique.

Brooks weaves in the recent popular idea of a "green apocalypse" in her book, that is, wildlife and nature growing wild, with some truly evocative and unnerving descriptions of the wastelands wild flora and fauna. There's one particular scene with where the train is followed by "trains" that decently freaked me out. There's also a layer of cosmic horror to the idea of these forms of life that is unsettling, especially as the story goes on.

The narration by Katie Leung was wonderful as well. I'm literally only familiar with her as Cho Chang from the Harry Potter movies, so I was very impressed with her narration. She does voices and accents and puts in the appropriate emotion - the former is frosting but the latter I find most important, especially after having recently listened to some audiobooks with awkward or lack of tone and inflection and it was... not pleasant. So having such a wonderful narrator now was welcomed, and Leung has a very nice voice for audiobooks as well.

Rating this is difficult for me, though, even as much as I enjoyed it, because it wasn't what I expected. It reminds me of something by Alix E. Harrow, a fantastical horror-adjacent historical fiction. I also was hoping it'd be like a new favorite I read recently, The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. It definitely has similar vibes, if you also enjoyed that story.

I think I'm giving this a 4 for now, because I know I'll be thinking about this story and it's world for a while and would happily check out a sequel if there was one.

The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks. I was prepared to love this book. I love the premise - a train trip on the Trans Siberian Railway that runs from Beijing to Moscow. The novel is a fantasy adventure story. The story is set on the luxurious yet perilous Trans-Siberian Express, the sole mode of transportation across the enigmatic Wastelands. This backdrop provides a rich setting filled with potential, though the execution sometimes falls short of the novel's ambitious premise. The blurbs comparing to Piranisi set a very high bar which this story does not meet.

The plot revolves around a group of passengers, and they all have secrets. In this repect, I understand the comparison to Murder on the Orient Express. Zhang Weiwei, the lifelong resident of the train, is an interesting character who offers a unique perspective on the dangerous journey. Her encounter with Elena, a stowaway with a mysterious connection to the Wastelands, adds a layer of intrigue and friendship. Marya Petrovna and Henry Grey are two other central characters whose stories add depth to the narrative. Marya, a grieving woman with a borrowed name, and Henry, a disgraced naturalist seeking redemption, provide personal stakes that enrich the story. However, their character arcs feel predictable and underdeveloped. The pacing is uneven as it starts very slowly, and I found the world building lacking.

The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands is a book that I liked, but did not love. It offers a unique setting and an interesting premise, but the execution lacks the world building, character development, and narrative complexity to fully capture the reader. Sarah Brooks has crafted a story with enormous potential, and while the journey is enjoyable, it feels like there are more stories left to be told and more depths to be explored within this world.

Overall, the novel is a book that I liked, although this more magical realism than fantasy. It’s a journey worth taking, even if it doesn’t quite reach the heights it aims for. 3.5 stars.

I loved the audio narration of this story.

Thank you to Net Galley and Macmillan Audio for my advance copy of the book.

A little bit of Murder on the Orient Express + a good amount of Snowpiercer, plus there be monsters in the wasteland. I felt like it blended its different flavors very well, and created a unique singular world that I'd definitely be interested in revisiting at some point.

THANK YOU to NetGalley & the Publisher for allowing me a free copy in exchange for an honest review!

I really enjoyed this book! I love how it feels - the atmosphere the story creates is cozy yet mysterious, like the ghost train in Spirited Away. In fact, I would often find myself thinking of Spirited Away while reading this book, but not because anything was copied or directly inspired by, but because it had the perfect vibes that Spirited Away offers. I was shocked that the author has only written cooking/herbal/how to guides previous to this!

I liked the writing style of this book a lot. There are a lot of fantasy books recently that read like a high school project, or fanfiction. This felt adult, educated, and with zero cringe involved. This is my number one issue with all books I read. If they can pass the cringe writing test, the book is automatically elevated above others.

The concepts presented in this book are great. I loved the concept of WeiWei as a character being born on the train and therefore from the train itself, belonging neither here nor there. The train itself doesn't do much for me (not really an "Orient Express" story-type fan) but coupled with the rest of the concepts presented, it works extremely well.

I loved the concept of the landscape/Wasteland. I love that it's all interconnected, like its own world apart from the one it's sharing the planet with. I love that everything is interconnected, like fungi. But I also hated that it had to be Fungi. Everything recently plays off the idea of invasive fungi. I think it's an over-played idea - maybe have things communicate through shared energies or something? Collective unconscious? Or, just leave it ambiguous. There's already a ton of Wasteland ambiguity so I don't feel like it would work against it to not explain that aspect. I will say though, after making it to the end, I see why she said the landscape was calling to them to ride the train at the beginning of the story. It does seem like the Wasteland was waiting for the right group to present itself.

I found myself thinking about current events way more than I would have ever expected to while reading this book (in a good way!). In a time of Boeing scandals, and train derailment scandals, this book does feel eerily too familiar. The Company and the way they conduct themselves is a little too realistic to be Science Fiction!

The main reason I knocked off a star is... it does drag. As others have said in their reviews, from about 20% through 50%, it's sort of a drag. The world building in the first part, and the relationship building/climax in the last half are great, but the middle meat of the story doesn't provide enough excitement or drama to keep us rolling. It is definitely a slow burn Sci-Fi Fantasy novel. It didn't bother me that much since I was enjoying the experience of the Spirited Away train ride vibes, but I found myself asking questions that weren't really answered. For instance..

I realized at about 50% that they had been talking about how toxic and scary the Wastelands are, but are also riding on a train that someone had to build tracks for. It wasn't really explained how the track was built, I don't think. Unless I missed it? It needed to be more clear how all of this was possible, or safety measures taken for this train to function. The history of the discovery of the Wastelands, and why it was automatically feared, etc. would have helped a lot to clear up some basic underlying questions.

That leads me to my other point -- How does the Wastelands work? I thought we were going to have an adventure through the Wastelands. What we got was a train ride through the Wastelands with only 5% Wasteland participation in the story. It was mostly just the train ride, and the people on it, with no direct contact or explanation on why the Wastelands are feared, toxic, etc. I think ultimately this is because our characters are from "our side" of the world and don't know anything about the Wastelands themselves (hence the train rides through & obvious experimentations) but we had a character directly from the Wastelands that was interacting with a main character. We could have had something. The scene where they actually make it off the train and into the Wastelands would have been amazing for that. The two characters could have had prolonged exposure to the Wastelands and a plot point inserted to give us a natural, in-context view of how this world works. Instead, we only got more questions. What was the loud, raging creature? Why did it care that the moss went missing, if it was what was needed for the train to become infected? With more exploration, the book would have had less dragging/more momentum, and the story would have been so much richer.

Overall, loved this book. I really just think the pacing suffers here and there, and more in depth world building could have been offered to correct that pacing. I will be looking forward to the next thing Sarah has to offer & would 100% read any sequel to this!

"The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands" is an engrossing atmospheric novel that's reminiscent of a classical area both in time and narrative. A turn of the century alternative history tale, it takes place in a time where science and innovation are making common place wonders with rapidity that surround people with new curiosities. Yet at the same time, there is enough lingering in nature and the unknown mixed with tradition and folklore where things that go bump in the night might have a dozen explanations.

Take this mindset and place those rattlings in a 'closed room' type of setting breeds a delicious foreboding that made some of the most memorable fantastical-horror and gothic tales that have survived to entrance readers today so chilling. There is just enough space when given these considerations where the reader can wonder for a great deal of the narrative if maybe, just maybe, the big bad company isn't being quite as self serving as they seem. Maybe the precautions and strange happenings are psychological. Maybe the outside has more traditional dangers. And yet... and yeeeeet...

Filled with some traditional character types that might be found in traditional elite circles, the nosy old noble widow, the rich newlyweds, the scholars, along with a multiracial cast that spans as broad as the trail line itself, creates an interesting variety of experiences and viewpoints. There are also the comparisons between workers and passengers, with a sprinkling of the 'third classers'.

Beyond the vibes and rhythms of the people and the train itself that are so beautifully painted is the vivid outer world. There are times where the writing is close to poetic to the point where things seem visceral. The concepts that are explored bring up classic themes but in a way that seems both apparent but still worth consideration. How do our motivations shape nature? What happens when nature adapts? Is it embracing what is enforced on it? Does it fight back? Where is the line between science, discovery, creation, and the mystical? What does it mean to see? And who has the right to impose one's will and desires? What happens when you hop back and forth between worlds and wishes?

On top of this, the narration for the audiobook while I personally may have made a few different choices in some scenes is absolutely spot on when it comes to 'the girl of the train' and a stowaway. There is a haunting, lingering quality that adds that little extra weight to the unknown happenings. The dialogue/character work is also exceptionally solid.

All in all this was absolutely a read you can sink into. More hypnotic than engaging at times, but if you're in the right mood, it can be a heck of a ride.