BOOK TOUR STOP x @InstaBookTours - This Fragile Earth by Susannah Wise

What if the world stopped working?

Signy lives in the London with her son Jed and boyfriend Matthew. And to be honest, they're only together because of Jed. Despite living in a world much like ours but far more technologically superior, her life is boring, dull and grey.

But then, it goes black and leaves her and the rest of the world in the dark. The lights won't turn on. Their phones stop working. Robots and droids malfunction. Even the water stops pumping. Matthew agrees with the Government statements - that it's just an outage, a glitch, and it'll be fixed in a few hours. But he's wrong as usual - the world is beyond fixing now.

Signy needs to get Jed out of the city, a place now full of desperation and violence, and tries to make her way to the small village her parents live in. She needs to find some kind of safety for him, no matter what.

But to survive on such a fragile earth, she will need to find strength like never before.

This Fragile Earth is a startling reflection of the beautiful fragility, but also resilience of humanity, the awe of being alive and what it truly means to be human to different people. The story flowed easily, starting strong and the days merging into one another, getting worse one by one and creating a sense of rising dread and disquiet.

The world created by Wise was a compelling and intriguing mirror of modern cities, where everything is automated and even Bees can be replaced with artificial copies - and the sheer normality in which our characters regard these things makes it feel even more shockingly possible.

The characterisation was quickly established - Signy and Jed quickly becoming the focal points of the worlds catastrophe and becoming impossible not to care for. However, there were a lot of inconsistencies in certain characters that did make me struggle, namely Jed who sometimes spoke like a six year old, and others like a sixty year old.

Without really noticing, this story morphed and changed into something else as the pages flew by - leaving the modern collapse of society behind and become a tale about rebirth, about nature and time and humanity. The prose took on an almost ethereal nature, like a dreamscape.

While I was left wanting just a bit more, something else to conclude such an epic tale, this was undeniable a compelling and engaging journey with a clear, stark warning about our relationship not only with Earth, but with each other.

⭐⭐⭐

I was gifted a reviewers copy of this title in return for an honest review. Thank you to Vic at InstaBookTours and the Susannah Wise for inviting me to take part in this tour.

CW: Swearing, death, violence, illness, sex (off-page)

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