Aftertime by Sophie Littlefield

Available February 2011

The world’s gone.
Worse, so is her daughter.

Awakening in a bleak landscape as scarred as her body, Cass Dollar vaguely recalls surviving something terrible. Having no idea how many days—or weeks—have passed, she slowly realizes the horrifying truth: Ruthie has vanished.

And with her, nearly all of civilization. Where once-lush hills carried cars and commerce, the roads today see only cannibalistic Beaters—people turned hungry for human flesh by a government experiment gone wrong.

In a broken, barren California, Cass will undergo a harrowing quest to get her Ruthie back. Few people trust an outsider, let alone a woman who became a zombie and somehow turned back, but she finds help from an enigmatic outlaw, Smoke. Smoke is her savior, and her safety. For the Beaters are out there. And the humans grip at survival with their trigger fingers. Especially when they learn that she and Ruthie have become the most feared, and desired, of weapons in a brave new world....

My opinion: First off we meet Cass, who is wandering by herself alone. She has no recollection of what happened to her, but she has scars all over her body. A new plant species was introduced to the U.S. and by eating it, people developed a severe fever. If they survived that initial fever, they would slowly develop into what we would consider zombies; they are driven by the need to eat human flesh and only that. Cass knows she was attacked by these creatures, called Beaters, and she did get the disease for a while, but somehow her body fought it off. The attack happened two months previously and now Cass has no idea where her 3 year old daughter Ruthie is, but she knows she needs to find her. Due to the scars though, she knows it will be hard to prove to anyone that she isn't a Beater, so luckily she wanders across a young girl. The girl takes Cass back to the place where she's staying and is able to plead her case. There she meets a Smoke, a man who is determined to help keep people safe and help keep sort of an order. He agrees to take her to the Library where she lived with her daughter before she was taken, to see if by some miracle Ruthie is still there. Cass hates relying on other people, but she knows early on that she can trust Smoke. When they get to the Library, Cass is treated as a stranger. A woman she used to know there confides that if they know that she was attacked by Beaters, she will most likely be disposed of. She also learns that her daughter was bitten and developed a fever and signs of the disease too, but like Cass she recovered. But Ruthie is not there anymore, she has been sent to a place called the Convent where they believe their faith will cure anything (but to a lot of people it seems more like a cult). So Smoke accompanies Cass on her journey, and they find themselves growing closer and closer with each passing day. But Cass knows that her ultimate goal is to find her daughter, and she can't let anything distract her...not even the man who would give his life for her.

I really, really liked this book. Cass was definitely tough; living in times like that would be hard enough, but not to know what happened to your child was be impossible. I really liked Smoke too, he was so confident and kept his morals even when the rest of the world was becoming almost barbaric. It was obvious he would do whatever he had to to keep Cass safe and help her in her mission. She held back from him a lot, because she was afraid that she could be a carrier for the disease and infect him somehow. Cass had a rough time growing up; her dad was suddenly gone, her mom remarried and her stepdad sexually molested her. Then she ended up becoming an alcoholic and sleeping with lots of different men. She got pregnant and still had trouble changing. Her mom took Ruthie and then Cass became obsessed with getting her child back. So she cleaned herself up, which is really admirable, but still her mom would not give Ruthie back to her. So when the disease started changing people and chaos erupted, she took Ruthie, and that's how they ended up at the Library. I think she constantly feels like she has to make up for the bad choices she made earlier in her life, make it up to Ruthie for not being there for her like she should have been the whole time. It's easy to believe that this is what the world would look like if something like this happened; it reminded me of a lot of the zombie movies I have seen, half of the U.S. was blocked off to contain the disease from spreading. It also reminded me of the game Fallout; while not the same premise, the outcome was much the same, groups of people forming their own societies with different rules and ideals and having to trade items for other items since money became worthless. It was a really good book, keeping you guessing on what will happen at the end and a lot of suspense. I look forward to reading more from this author!

My rating: 4/5 stars