Book Review: But The Children Survived, by A. L. Jambor

            First of all, if you disagree with my assessment, please feel free to post about it in the comments section. And if you agree, please please post, because I’ve got a feeling that this one’s gonna stir up some controversy.

            It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel . . . like I read this a few weeks ago. It was called Tycho, and it was about a whole lot of people—like, the entire population of the earth—dying because of a biological weapon. It’s the same scenario this week, in A. L. Jambor’s But The Children Survived, except two hundred pages longer and with many more narrators. When only a small group of children appear immune to the plague, it’s up to a team of scientists, working in an airtight biosphere in Florida, to uncover the mysterious machinations of the pharmaceutical company whose greed doomed millions . . . and whose knowledge might yet hold the key to humanity’s survival. But The Children Survived is full of interesting ideas, but the excess of characters make it hard to sympathize with anyone and the constant backstory slows the story to a snail’s crawl.

Professional cover design! Love that!

           

            The protagonist, Mindy, is staying at her grandmother’s house with her dog, Baby Girl, when the apocalypse strikes. Terrified and alone, with only her grandmother’s gun and old dog for protection, she forages for supplies in the dead wasteland until a team of scientists in haz-mat suits drags her back to their biodome. There, she finds food, shelter, and friends. Yet Mindy doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life in the biodome—at least not until she knows whether her parents are still alive. When loner Mark arrives at the biodome, Mindy gets the chance to escape she’s been waiting for.

            As the story unfolds, we learn the history of every last scientist living at the biodome. Christie, the only female scientist, suffered the loss of her husband and child in a car accident. Gerald, another kooky researcher, had a bad break up with his wife. While the backstory has its interesting points, it can be a little tedious in parts. But The Children Survived is roughly forty percent backstory of how the plague—and the children’s immunity—came to be. You honestly have to love the characters to put up with the slow pace, and the characters didn’t feel real enough to draw me in. The author’s voice is the same for every character, and they all seem to blend together after a while.

             The journey of Antonio, an Italian scientist seeking a cure for the pregnancy complication that took his mother’s life, is one of the high points of the book. Antonio is a genuinely interesting character, but the suspense of his quest is dampened by long, pointless asides. There’s an entire chapter where Antonio’s wife looks for stud to breed her dog with—a chapter that could have been summed up in one or two sentences. Likewise with all the backstory about this pharmaceutical company. We learn early on in the book that the apocalypse was caused by an insane scientist releasing the weapon. The internal drama of this company, as compelling as it might be in another setting, isn’t necessary because the readers already know that the company and almost everyone who works for it is going to die, rendering it pointless to the main story. Complex plots that are revealed in bits and pieces can be good things, but only if the bits and pieces contribute to the main story. One hundred and fifty pages could easily have been cut.

            One character, who struggles with a gambling addiction, has to make sense of a world where money no longer has value. That’s an interesting, fresh idea—and yet, it’s hard for me to sympathize with him. We’re told he ‘finds God’ through caring for the orphaned children. Great for him. However, as a Christian woman, I know that finding God can be an emotionally exhausting, painful, sometimes euphoric process full of bumps along the way. But the words on the page don’t evoke those emotions. Maybe they would for another reader, but the burden of making me feel rests on the author’s shoulders alone.

            The author’s skill with tactile imagery only extends to, over and over, describing how bad all the corpses smell and how after a few weeks they’re nothing but bone and hair. It was a shocking image the first time I heard a rotting body described in print—when I was, what, twelve? Now it’s routine. Encountering the human body in decay should be sobering. It reminds us we only have so long to live. These are characters encountering mortality in the most painful of ways and yet few of them show any real trauma. None show symptoms of PTSD, not even the children who have seen everyone they know and love drop dead around them. This would be extremely traumatizing in real life. They would need therapy. They would not be as playful and kind to each other as we see here.

            When large groups of real people are confined to close quarters, fights break out. Cliques form. Leaders arise and so do challengers. Heck, you’ll get this in any dorm on any college campus. These people are under way more stress than your average college student and yet they all seem to get along fine. It’s tempting for an author to make all their characters get along—if you like these characters you’ve created, it follows that they must like each other. A little internal tension would have gone a long way towards creating suspense. There’s one disliked character in the group, but without major divisions, the story feels artificial.

            But The Children Survived is certainly an ambitious undertaking. The backstory, even if it is mostly irrelevant to the plot, is well organized and there weren’t too many plotholes I could spot. There’s some good lines: “Joe’s inability to accept responsibility had always caused him to create an alternate universe wherein he was the victim of everyone else’s plots.” And there’s some genuinely creepy moments, involving test tubes of the biological weapons referred to as ‘my babies’ and one man’s twisted love of his cow. The author has a real gift for writing crazy characters that freak me out—but the normal characters lack the spark of madness that make the crazy ones shine.

            Highs: Mindy’s quest to find her parents. We really feel for this little girl who’s all on her own and the author makes us hope her parents will survive. The prologue. It has an excellent twist that really grabbed my interest. The creepiness. Again, the author really made me shiver when I read about her villains.

            Lows: Literal Chekov’s Gun. Mindy has a gun she took from her grandmother’s collection. Yet she only uses it to shoot a rat. That should be foreshadowing, not the only time that gun is ever used. Bad word choice. I would expect something like “They were more than friends; they were brothers and sisters in the trenches, akin to soldiers in war. All their inhibitions were gone, their masks stripped away,” to fit erotica, not a meeting of children. Backstory. So much of it could have been cut. Deleting scenes you love is part of being a writer.

            As apocalyptic fiction, I give it three stars out of five. As a novel, two and a half. And if you disagree, please feel free to voice your opinion in the comments section.

You can download But The Children Survived here. You can also go here and purchase my book, Iceclaw.