Scalzi is one of my favorites and I admit, I was saving this book for when I really, REALLY needed a good story/escape and if now isn't the time, I don't know what is.

I was not disappointed. Granted, the premise of a global-wide pandemic that had three stages that killed a lot of people was kind of parallel to now, but this book takes place about 25 years after it happened and shows the aftermath. And it wasn't completely bleak and negative. Yeah, there were bad people, but there were good people too. And lots of good came from people banding together to help one another.

It doesn't hurt that the MC was a newly minted FBI agent who was trying to do the right thing, that all of the law enforcement officers were trying to do the right thing.

One could also go deep on the implications of how those with Haden's Locked In syndrome were the new minority, how gender and other prior factors that determined minority weren't as obviously an issue when some people started to walk around in robot units. Unless one customized their robot unit, or "threep", the viewer couldn't tell gender, color, etc. The only way they could be judged was by the fact that they were walking around in a robot because they had to due to the disease they had.

The world in this book had positives, but it also had realistic humans in it, so there was also hate and lack of understanding, or even a willingness to understand, what was different, what was "other".

But it wasn't all hatred and unwillingness to understand. There was good too, and more good than bad I would argue, at least from the MC and the characters around them that we primarily saw. There was hope, believable hope, which I badly needed right now and which I think the world could use a huge heaping of, as well.

Scalzi has a great sense of humor and has a pretty good bead on human nature and how to convey that through his characters, snappy dialogue and different, but kind of the same as now, premises.

This book was amazing and just rang all of my bells. The sci-fi aspect may not be your thing, but it is used in a very interesting way that kind of mirrors what is happening now. It blows my mind that sci-fi can be so predictive of the "real" world. Spooky, but I appreciate the hope the reader is left with at the end of the book. 5, if you haven't read it yet what are you waiting for, stars. : )

My thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge for an eARC copy of this book to read and review.

Sorry, requested but did not find the time to review.