I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.

A hopeful post-apocalyptic quest novel, The Way stands out in its anti-violence protagonist and focus on spiritual concerns.

The main character is great. He’s a middle-aged man who has accepted this lonely fact and struggles to maintain his ethics in a world with very few. He also has befriended a cat and a bird, whom he’s able to communicate with. The level he can “talk” to them I found a bit over-the-top; I have no doubt you could train or learn to read the cues of a raven and vice versa, as they are very smart, and I could “talk” with my cat when she was around, in that I understood certain pitches she made to mean different things, but full-on conversations and the animals' understandings of complex concepts I was like, “I don’t know.” Still, I liked the cat and raven characters a lot, as I did Will. The girl too, when she arrives, is tough, funny, and the father-daughter bond they create is very wholesome.

The setting, a road trip from Colorado to California, is just awesome, but I'm biased because the US Southwest is one of my favourite places to visit. I really enjoyed the setting and how the landscape had been altered based on the calamity. You have herds of camels running around, escaped tigers (as we all know from Tiger King, there are a lot of tigers in the USA), and, because the collapse happened about twenty years from now, some genetically mutated animals. There are the classic small struggling towns, the hermits, the abandoned places … all the tropes of post-apocalyptic quest novels. I definitely enjoyed that aspect.

I also enjoyed the commentary about climate change and our self-destructive nature as a species that ran through the book.

Now, there are two things I found a little bit less than interesting. The first is the plot. The reason for Will going to California has been seen again and again in the sub-genre - there’s a cure for the virus here, or take the cure here, and all will be well. The Last of Us has the same plot essentially. Of course, the reason for doing stuff in post-apoc novels does tend to be limited, and I do enjoy a quest novel, but the reason for the bad guy chasing Will was also sort of confusing, and the end result was quite anti-climactic.

I will also admit I was kind of over the book by about 80%. There’s a lot of philosophizing and soul-searching in the novel that I, who only gets spiritual about the ocean and the desert and minimally at best, found bogged down the story quite a bit and got a little preachy. In the end, when I should have been exhilarated for the climax, it felt more like when you’re jogging, and you think you’ve hit the last bend, and then it turns out you have a whole other kilometre. I was just sort of done with it.

There were also references to movies that someone who is like 20 today most likely will not have seen or heard of; this felt sort of out of place. The setting is 2050s and the guy is like 50, so he'd been born in 2000 technically. If he referenced movies of today, or movies he enjoyed when he was learning about himself and made an impression on him in his late teens/early twenties, that would have been more interesting than talking about Casablanca.

Yet, the book has some beautiful writing it in and the situations behind it were interesting - I just found the spiritual or philosophical aspects a little too heavy-handed; I don’t like being preached at, and while I don’t mind an allegory or even a subtle message, this book sometimes felt like a Buddhism manual. Not really my jam.

Definitely an original book. I loved the landscape and the originality of the world that was created. The Buddhist philosophies were a bit heavy for me in places, but they were definitely thought-provoking.

Thank you for the opportunity to preview this work.

I really enjoyed this story. Loved the characters so much, especially Cassie and Peau. This was definitely different and could have done without cat and bird porn, but I really loved the story.

Thanks to NetGalley and Speigel & Grau for an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

Post-apocalyptic novel with animal companions and found family? PLEASE AND THANK YOU. That being said, I have been afraid to read another post-apocalyptic novel since I read Swan Song (I know, I KNOW, don’t judge me or do the math on that, but to be fair, I read it about 10 years after it came out) because I was afraid nothing would ever live up to it. Hell, I haven’t even re-read Swan Song because I was afraid Swan Song wouldn’t live up to Swan Song. Swan Song. No, I haven’t read The Road, or I Am Legend, or Station Eleven, or Cloud Atlas, or Lucifer’s Hammer, or A Canticle for Leibowitz (although I recently bought these last two).

Swan Song…this is not. But it is still hella good, just in a different way.

Will has been taking care of a Buddhist monastery for the past 14 years, ever since Mayhem - a series of devastating events that wiped out 80% of the population. Things haven't been looking up in the world - the average lifespan of humans is now under 30. Old diseases thought to have been immunized out of the population come back with a vengeance since there are no hospitals, no vaccines. All there are are angry children, teenagers, and young adults whose hope in a better future died long ago.

Will, who is over 50 years old, has also gotten wind of a mysterious illness known as Disease X, which is wreaking havoc on anyone over a certain age - making them crazy for nine months then killing them. But there is also a possible cure, and he has been asked to take this cure to California. The cure ampoule is implanted in him while he is out so he doesn't know where it is, then he sets off in hollowed-out truck pulled by two donkeys.

For company? Peau, the raven, and Cassie, the cat, both of whom he has learned to communicate with over the years.

Such a cure would be worth everything to anyone who knew about it, but Will was under the impression that he was one of the very, very few who knew. So who is this Buck Flynn that is now tailing him on his journey west?

Along the way, Will finds small communities, some of them getting along, some of them not, and he meets a lot of people, some more than willing to help him, some of them not.

The book is very introspective on Will's part. He finds himself with an internal debate about how he can live his pacifist lifestyle in the end of the world when there are SO MANY PEOPLE TRYING TO KILL HIM.

Add to this, along the way he is morally obligated to take along a 14-year old from a brothel where the woman taking care of the place has kept Sophie from the things that the older girls have to do to keep food and resources coming in, but as Sophie gets older, she will not be able to protect her forever. But Will is just passing through the town where the orphan became stranded with other orphans a while back when their wagon broke down, so he can take her with him, or so asks the woman running the brothel. How could he say no? But he makes sure she is aware that there are people after him.

I absolutely adored Peau and Cassie, with the exception one very disturbing instance during Cassie's time in heat that was very....well....disturbing. (This was a deduction of 0.25 stars for me because…ew.)

While I guess I couldn’t quite call this a “cozy” post-apocalyptic novel, it’s not far off. The danger is there, yes, the diseases, the hungry orphans, the collapse of civilization. But Will’s relationships with Peau, Cassie, and Sophie made this a much more enjoyable experience? (Question mark because I know it sounds weird.) Then there were the sweet letters he writes to his dead ex-girlfriend (?), Eva.

I am going to say it again. I loved Peau. I am not saying Cassie didn’t have a personality or wasn’t well-written (she does, she was), I am saying Peau’s personality was just so freaking epic. I am partial to corvids of any type, really, but I mean… Come on.

Plus, there is so much information packed into this little novel (“little” novel = 304 pages, I’ve been eating fantasy). So many fascinating tidbits to Google and fall into rabbit holes over. (Example: What is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and how does is spread?) I loved this book. Loved it. It is precious to me because of Peau and the way an angry orphan in need of a father-figure and a lonely, childless man with Buddhist tendencies and a heart bigger than he gives himself credit for become a family.

The Way is a post-apocalyptic tale of Will's journey from (what used to be) Colorado to California to deliver a possible cure for the virus that wiped out humanity.

I've seen this book compared to The Last of Us and Station Eleven, so between these comparisons and the blurb describing a harrowing journey across a post-apocalyptic countryside I was expecting a medium- to fast-paced story featuring danger, adventure, and ambiguous morals. This, dear reader, was not that so please calibrate your expectations. Will's journey is both beautiful and hazardous, but the story is much quieter, slow moving, and introspective than I was expecting. The author focuses heavily on tangents such as Buddhism principles, literature, philosophy, and quantum physics, which often felt disjointed and took me out of the story. This was a deep, reflective tale that will absolutely delight many readers, but it didn't light the fire of this reader. Animal lovers will appreciate the inclusion of a grumpy cat, a brilliant raven, and other characters that can communicate with Will and enrich the story mightily.

Thank you to NetGalley and published Spiegel and Garu for the opportunity to read this book prior to its publication in exchange for my honest review.

I have read books about post-apocalyptic worlds that I enjoyed, but I couldn't even get through the first chapter of The Way. Not that it wasn't a good book; I just couldn't get the mental images of the horse episode out of my mind. I'm sure die-hard Sci-Fi fans love this book, but it was not for me. Thanks to the author, Spiegel & Grau, and NetGalley. I received a complimentary copy of this ebook. The opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own.

(Rounded down from 2.5)


An imaginative and immersive landscape and interesting, complicated characters weren’t enough to make this post-apocalyptic road trip one that worked for me.

The good? Across the board the writing was good. It was descriptive and pleasant, and did a good job of matching the tone—though I am not sure I was always a fan of the tone, yet still the writing and atmosphere felt concordant. Similarly, I thought the characters had a lot of promise, the main characters and ancillary characters both. I could see they had depth, they weren’t simple place holders or archetypes, but at the same time their actions seemed to betray the depths they contained, as they often made the least interesting choices. Additionally, while the pacing and urgency didn’t quite work for me the way the various set-pieces were lined up, the shift from travel to danger to rest to danger to travel monotony and back again, etc., that felt well-balanced. Nothing was stagnant too long and the balance felt right in the world as built. That did really shine for me, the world-building. There are countless visions of what a post-apocalyptic American landscape will look like, and Groner does a good job of, through the course of the characters’ journey, showing a number of different community and survival situations that might emerge in that post-plague landscape. It wasn’t all just a simple barren free-for-all, or something like that, and the possibilities he presented were inventive and fun.

Unfortunately, that is where my fun with the book kind of stops. Ultimately everything felt way too explicit, too convenient and on-the-surface. I never felt any sense of peril or action, and the ways the character resolved each conflict seemed remarkably convenient, and therefore uninteresting. I know the character was supposed to have gone on some sort of emotional journey through this process, but that didn’t come across, and some of the Buddhist elements are what were clumsiest and least interesting to me. I am a Tibetan Buddhist monk, have been for more than thirteen years, so I appreciated the character’s struggles. But everything was so obvious and on the surface, it never felt like he was feeling any of these Buddhist ideas conundrums, he was just saying them. At one point, when reflecting on his trouble communicating with his girlfriend, the main character says, “I wasn’t explaining this very well, and I couldn’t figure out how to put it without sounding dogmatic.” That was the problem, writ large, with the book itself. All the moral quarries he found himself navigating, those were interesting, but it always felt like he was simply explaining a beginner’s understanding of Buddhism instead of actually feeling, actually emotionally and intellectually grappling with, these difficulties. Nothing felt subtle, nothing felt personal, and so those Buddhist preoccupations didn’t feel lived in, they felt like distant explorations or intellectual exercises. There are plenty of ways to talk about the character’s distress at having to harm others or take life without explicitly talking about the Buddhist precept not to harm, and so forth.

I did like the addition of the magical realism elements, the talking animals, but they were also one of the small things that threw a wrench in this world building. It isn’t a serious thing, but just how they could communicate with the main character felt loose and unformed. So, he could understand cat and crow, but they could also understand English? And they eventually could understand each other, too? Why couldn’t he, or they, understand the other animals in their group, the mules and horses and dogs? It just felt fast and loose, and that took away from my enjoyment. Similarly, the discussion of there existing some internet with “servers that kept moving around,” just felt like a baffling inclusion, because that isn’t how the internet works. A number of little small things like this on their own were little speed bumps but added up to keep the narrative always an arm’s distance away from me, never letting me really fall into it or feel immersed in it, because I kept getting pulled out by these small things that just felt a little sloppy or lazy. And the ending, the Buddhist mystical aspects at the end? To be honest it was a little frustrating, because it felt both predictable and unearned, which is a poisonous combination.


I like the ambition of the story, and I liked that the main character had a different emotional grounding than we are used to seeing, and that (hypothetically) lead to a different set of obstacles. The instinct for mixing rambling on the road with action set-pieces with moments of relaxation was good, but since the action and danger never felt genuine it ended up reading as slower than that narrative instinct would suggest. The attempt at blending spirituality with science with magical realism with the perils of a post-apocalyptic landscape was a noble one, and it has the seeds of a lot of interesting ideas. None of them fully ripened in a way that lived up to their promise for me, but your mileage may vary.


I want to thank the author, the publisher Spiegel & Grau, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

“The only way to stop killing is to stop breathing, but then you kill yourself.”

The Way is an adventure of survival that seems to take an unwanted detour but somehow still arrives on time.

In this dystopian world, Will takes a journey across the Western United States with what could be a cure for a disease that took out most of the population. With little to no electricity and society completely changed, he must band together with his animal friends to complete this journey.

Cary Groner does a great job at pulling you in from the beginning. He paints a picture of this fallen world that is fun and imaginative to read. But somewhere in the middle connection is lost with Will. No longer caring about the main protagonist. Whether he lives or dies or even whether he makes it to his destination carrying the very thing that could possibly save humanity. Then I was pulled back in during the last part of the book, when tension seemed to rise and the stakes were re-communicated. I just wish I never stopped carrying about Will along the journey.

If this was done intentionally, Well done! If not, I need something to happen in the middle to reconnect me to humanity itself.

A very well written and entertaining story! A fresh look at the popular Apocalypse/ Virus genre so popular at the moment. I definitely recommend this book!!!

I was intrigued by the book's concept about a man delivering a potential cure in a postapocalyptic America. Will is traveling from Colorado to California in a truck pulled by two mules with Cassie, a cat, and a raven named Peau. Will, Cassie and Peau can talk to one another (even though that is never explained). My favorite character was Peau. He's like a drone and is able to scout out the landscape on their travels and saves Will many times. Though I liked the story, too many things were unexplained, such as why Will can only talk to Cassie and Peau but not other animals, even the mules that are on the same trip and why other people can't talk to animals. Also in the postapocalyptic world, very few people live past 30 so how has Will survived to his late 50's? Also I understand Buddhism is important to Will's character and how he is against killing people but many times the in depth discussions revolving around Buddhism went way over my head.

Like a gritty post-apocalyptic jaunt through a lawless West, but your main character is a Buddhist monk who avoids hurting/killing people, when people want to kill him. Will is a courier for a potential cure for a plague that ravaged the world, but the man trying to stop him is actually the least of his worries. The remains of society, the lawlessness, the unchecked wilderness is doing a pretty good job of it on its own. Will reflects on this a lot during his journey, and his additional traveling companions, a cat named Cass, a raven named Peau, provide him with additional food for thought and perspectives throughout.

I appreciated the extensive inclusion of Buddhism/Buddhist principles throughout the book, as this is more meant to be an introspective journey than it is a gritty wall-to-wall dystopian adventure. I really felt a part of the world the author was crafting here, and I think I enjoyed the quiet moments of the journey and his interactions/troubleshooting along the way, more than the scenes involving actual action. I like how the author handles Cass and Peau's "talking", equal parts magical realism and plain understanding of animal vocalizations. I like the story told here as well, with the backstory of the Mayhems sprinkled in alongside the journey to get the cure to California.

A fantastic book. I enjoyed every minute of it.

I received a free e-arc through Netgalley. The blurb said it was similar to [book:The Passage|6690798] and I found that to be true. This was a fast read for me because it was hard to put down. I'm hoping for a sequel or maybe more books from other peoples' POV during the same fictional period. Please keep writing!

I'm always a sucker for post-apocalyptic dystopian survival stories, and I like the structure of road novels where a character is on a journey with a fixed end point. The blurb promised a "highly original contribution" to the genre, so I was excited to give The Way a go.

Initially I really enjoyed this. Although it's billed as SF&F the speculative elements (aside from "the majority of the global population have perished due to a mystery contagion") are initially fairly light, and at first it read much more like a western. Journeying across an American west populated by escaped zoo animals in an old Ford F-150 pulled by a pair of mules is very compelling to me, and the opening sequences had me hooked.

Unfortunately as time wore on I became less enamoured with things. Will spends his time talking to his cat Cassie and a raven named Peau that has adopted him, and initially it's hinted that his belief he can talk to them is linked to the illness that's killed everyone over the age of 30 (but not, for some reason, him). It's a little weird, but weird is fine. As things progress, though, his conversations with the bird and the cat become much less ambiguous, until he's holding explicit dialogues with them - something that other characters begin to take part in, too. It all became a little too farfetched for me, particularly as there's never any real attempt made to explain why humans can suddenly communicate with animals without any real issues. Things get even more ridiculous in a sequence in which the cat goes into heat and has sex with the raven, which is played off as being completely unremarkable. I almost put the book down at this point, but the rest of the story was compelling enough that I wanted to see where things went.

Ultimately I don't know if it was really worth persevering. There are some good set pieces and moments here, and it's competently written, but the ending feels like it suddenly rushes to tie everything up after having previously feeling like the book was happy to take its time getting to where it's going, and the ending it rushes towards isn't an especially good one. Particularly as so much of the book is concerned with Buddhist philosophy and talking about allowing things to take their natural course, I had hoped that a little more time would be allotted to allow things to resolve themselves.

My biggest problem, though, is one of simply not believing the central premise. A few characters mention that Will is uniquely suited to the task of urgently transporting a potential miracle cure across thousands of miles of hostile territory, but it's never made clear why this is true of a former science writer who has spent 15 years living in seclusion in a meditation centre. And during the course of his journey he isn't really tested in any way that demonstrates why he's the best choice. Everything comes fairly easily to him, and even in moments of peril he's often saved by acts of nature that verge on deus ex machina.

This isn't to say that there's nothing to like here. The post-catastrophe world is well realised and the few characters we meet feel real and complex. Some of the set pieces are really fun - particularly the train ride across the desert - and I just wish everything had a little more weight to it.

Overall this was an enjoyable, if inconsistent, read that may have benefitted from doing less with the speculative elements - specifically the conversational animals and weird interspecies sex scene - and leaning harder into the western side of things.

Thank you to NetGalley, Spiegel & Grau Publishing, and Cary Groner for allowing me to preview this title before it is available for publication, in exchange for an honest review.

I love apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic novels and was excited to get a chance to read this one. This book takes place in the future where the population has been decimated and all that is left are those under the age of 40. Our narrator, Will, is actually pushing 60 which is an anomaly in this new world. He is tasked with taking a cure to CA but is being chased by someone. He is traveling with a cat and raven, both of whom in which he can communicate, and he picks up a young girl along the way.

This book is incredibly slow. It was over halfway through the book before you are officially told that the population was destroyed through a virus and that something called Disease X, for whatever reason, appears to kill people once they are in their late 30s to early 40s. There is a lot of Buddhist theology discussed throughout, often for pages at a time. The narrator's dead, love of his life is a scientist and, while he talks about her incessantly in the flashbacks, there appears to be no chemistry. Their conversations fall flat and I simply could not figure out what about her was so appealing. The weirdest thing, however, is him talking to the cat and raven. Like full conversations. Once about sex. It was very cringy. The "twist" at the end was HIGHLY predictable and horribly anticlimactic.

Overall, I simply did not care for this book. I thought the writing was sophomoric and preachy. Maybe I wasn't the intended audience for this book?

This book is a lot like The Postman in that it has a lone man on a mission, traveling North America after a plague wipes out most of the population.
What I don’t understand is why it would take months to travel from Colorado to California. It took homesteaders 4-6 months to travel from St. Louis to California with 19th Century technology and without roads. This guy is traveling with a mule driven car on modern roads, even at mule speed it should take a month at most with pit stops.

BOOK REPORT
Received a complimentary copy of The Way, by Cary Groner, from Spiegel & Grau/NetGalley, for which I am appreciative, in exchange for a fair and honest review. Scroll past the BOOK REPORT section for a cut-and-paste of the DESCRIPTION of it from them if you want to read my thoughts on the book in the context of that summary.

I wanted to like this book more than I did, because: opinionated cat.

Alas, it was so much better in concept than execution. And I just hate to say that, because good for Cary Groner for trying to synthesize a particular worldview and tie it in with very of-the-moment issues like pandemics and climate change.

It’s just that he spent so, so much time (relatively speaking) on the topic of meditation. I mean, maybe other people “get” that more than I do, but I felt like he was attempting to describe how the number nine tastes.** Either you’ve had the experience and get it in a visceral way, or you haven’t and you don’t.

And won’t.

Also, the whole book was wildly implausible, and for some reason I just couldn’t suspend disbelief. It did bring back good memories of reading Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was in college, though. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...)

**THE NUMBER NINE**
It tastes like ice from one of those metal ice trays, ice that has been sitting in the freezer for way too long and has a weird odor. And some hoarfrost on it.

PS
Just to ice this particular cake, I’ll note for the record that the cover of The Way was very depressing and off-putting. I mean, I supposed that’s fitting for a novel about a mostly dystopian future, but in my humble opinion it’s not gonna help sales any.

DESCRIPTION
A postapocalyptic road trip and a quest for redemption.

The world has been ravaged by a lethal virus and, with few exceptions, only the young have survived. Cities and infrastructures have been destroyed, and the natural world has reclaimed the landscape in surprising ways, with herds of wild camels roaming the American West and crocodiles that glow neon green lurking in the rivers.

Against this perilous backdrop, Will Collins, the de facto caretaker of a Buddhist monastery in Colorado, receives an urgent and mysterious request: to deliver a potential cure to a scientist in what was once California. So Will sets out, haunted by dreams of the woman he once loved, in a rusted-out pickup pulled by two mules. A menacing thug is on his tail. Armed militias patrol the roads. And the only way he’ll make it is with the help of a clever raven, an opinionated cat, and a tough teenage girl who has learned to survive on her own.

A highly original contribution to the canon of dystopian literature, The Way is a thrilling and imaginative novel, full of warmth, wisdom, and surprises that reflect our world in unsettling, uncanny, and even hopeful ways.

First off, let me start by thanking Netgalley for a copy of this book to review. Additionally, a copy is being bought for our library system.

I will have to say that before given the opportunity to review this book, I knew nothing of this author or his previous work. And really, I know, almost nothing about Buddhism which features boldly in the story. But that is not a bad thing, and I actually enjoyed all the philosophical or esoteric bits.

But, I am getting ahead of myself. The reality is that the book subject matter appealed to me, right from the first sentence of reading a synopsis. It's one of those things that let you know right away whether you're going to like something or not before you even know anything about the subject. All the ingredients where there.
- Near future.
- Some kind of catastrophe.
- A Dystopian, post-apocalyptic society.
Finally, there was one other thing that caught my attention, the general "The World Without Us" vibe. It wasn't until I finished the book and read the author's notes that I found out that the author is a big fan of the "World Without Us." The same as me! (A quick aside: When growing up, I always had this side of me, where for example, I'd look out the back window into the back yard and would imagine, what would the world look 5 year from now if we, humans, disappeared from it? What would it look in 100 year? In 1000+ years? Then came the book: "The World Without Us" and the History Channel TV series, and I was in my element. Sometimes, I wonder why I did not take advantage of the itch I carried all my life and write a book like "The World Without us" before Alan Weisman did - But that's a topic for another day.)

There are authors in the genre whose every word has been consumed voraciously by this reader. I probably don't even need to name some of these authors. Although, by post-apocalyptic, I also include certain stories where humans are caught in some kind of "apocalypse" type of event that might displace them into the far future or a different galaxy or a different reality or the far or near past.

Did this novel use some of the tropes of this type of fiction? Probably. But we also need to understand that some of these "tropes" are also the "episodes" or "vignettes" that make up a story that moves the plot along. Look, you will not find something groundbreaking in this book. You will, however, find a very satisfying narrative, very well told, and in some ways very original. What I mean by that is that the themes that make up the whole are more than just tropes. The sum is greater than the parts that make up the narrative and the story achieves its purpose.

Yes, I would highly recommend this book, and I do not mind giving it four and a half stars.

This is the story of a quest west across a post apocalyptic America, where a lethal virus has wiped out 80% of the population. It is a strange and compelling mix of contemplative introspection, and danger and jeopardy - sometimes gentle, and sometimes gripping, but always thoughtful.

From the blurb:

“Against this perilous backdrop, Will Collins, the de facto caretaker of a Buddhist monastery in Colorado, receives an urgent and mysterious request: to deliver a potential cure to a scientist in what was once California. So Will sets out, haunted by dreams of the woman he once loved, in a rusted-out pickup pulled by two mules. A menacing thug is on his tail. Armed militias patrol the roads. And the only way he’ll make it is with the help of a clever raven, an opinionated cat, and a tough teenage girl who has learned to survive on her own.”

A majority of the story is taken up by Will’s quest west. He is accompanied by his cat, Cassie, and a raven, Peau, and somehow, they can all understand each other. This is recognised as being unusual by both Will and those he meets, and is never really explained. The additional perspectives of a cat and a raven - especially the raven - provide an interesting reflection on Will’s own thoughts and emotions, as well as the raven being a handy scout for Will as he treks through unknown territory.

For me, the heart of the book is the reflective nature of Will’s rumination on his own behaviour, thoughts, and emotions as he travels west. As he meets a variety of people in different and difficult situations, Will contemplates the meaning of his own flawed motivations and behaviour, and of the behaviour of others.

This is all rooted in Will’s Buddhist background; the author mentions his own modest knowledge of Buddhist philosophy in the Acknowledgements, and thanks his teachers in the Tibetan tradition. I have no direct knowledge of experience of Buddhism, and have only dabbled with meditation, but I found Will’s gentle and honest introspection very thought provoking, and in places quite moving.

Despite this reflective context, the plot is surprisingly gritty in places, and the realities of survival in the dystopian world that Will finds himself aren’t romanticised - this is a harsh world, with pockets of human pain amongst the backdrop of the natural world reclaiming its place. Unfortunately, it’s in the resolution of this plot that I felt the book was at its weakest. In the closing chapters, Will’s quest comes to a conclusion, and the details of what Will finds at his destination, and the identity and purpose of his pursuers, is revealed - and I found it oddly unsatisfying.

But despite the ending lacking the emotional impact I was expecting, and some of the explanation of the plot feeling a little contrived, I can forgive this book because of the depth and reflective introspection of the quest. There were many times that I stopped and highlighted a section, and sat and thought about it for a few minutes. This is a book that I will undoubtedly revisit, and get something new from it on each reading.

Thank you #NetGalley and Spiegel & Grau for the free review copy of #TheWay in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

A cozy little dystopian journey. Cass and Peau were delightful and easy favorites. I sometimes got the sense that Groner knows just how affably he can write protagonists, and that made me wary, but admittedly that's just a sense i got from the writing, nothing overt. More Buddhist overtones than i'd prefer, but overall that fact made sense for the character, and i didn't mind Will's pursuit of answers to living ethically in a violent world. His sweetness and integrity with Sophie was also a welcome reprieve to the direction that dynamic can often take. Overall i was bracing for something grimmer, waded through some expository spiritual sections, and pleasantly surprised by the resolution.

I’m a sucker for a post apocalyptic story. This was a great tale of living life while you still can. Animals play a significant part in Will's story, and without spoiling too much, the dynamic traveling companion duo of a Raven and a Cat was really a fun one.

I could have done without the lengthy detailed sections about Buddhism, classic novels, quantum mechanics and more. These sections made the book feel too highbrow for me and took away from the exciting pace of the main post-apocalyptic storyline.