From Publishers Weekly
British novelist Wesley ( A Sensible Life ; the YA fantasy Haphazard House ) brings a quirky and graceful sensibility to this tale set in the English countryside in the near future. An unspecified disaster has wiped out much of the world's population, and Miriam, her 13-year-old son, Paul, and his best friend, Henry, find that most of their human and animal neighbors have been reduced to fly-away piles of fur, wool, feathers and hair, occasionally accompanied by sets of dentures. These three establish contact with a nearby abbey and set up house with a motley gang of survivors (including two skating champions, the village grave-digger and an upholsterer with a soft spot for thieves). In cool, meticulous prose, the author imagines the nitty-gritty of daily life after the apocalypse. Travel, for example, is difficult but not impossible: rollerskating is one way of getting about, and so is a leap-frogging method of changing cars, finding a new vehicle whenever the road is blocked by wreckage. Though subject matter and setting call to mind Peter Dickinson's Changes trilogy, this quietly satisfying novel is not so much high adventure as it is a meditation on what it means to create one's own world. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Grade 6-8-Another enigmatic tale from the author of Haphazard House (Overlook, 1993), this was originally published in England in 1984 as a revised version of a 1969 story. After news reports of plague, famine, and oddly colored snow in various parts of the world, Muriel, her son Paul, and his best friend wake one morning to find that nearly all other life in their rural community has vanished. As they slowly join other survivors-a gravedigger, three monks, the crew from a Yugoslavian submarine, and several more-it becomes clear that some, though not all, were saved by being underground (the author makes no great effort to explain the exceptions). The boys adapt easily to their new life, dashing off to loot stores and explore neighboring towns, and Muriel, grieving over the recent death of her husband, copes ably but numbly with hers. They go to London, a bedlam where heavily armed survivors are desperately killing one another; they barely escape. Except for this episode, the story has a peaceful, gently humorous air created by deft dialogue, many Briticisms, and a quirky cast. The ending, however, may leave readers confused. Wesley implies that the disaster, which remains unexplained, was neither natural nor manmade, and signals some sort of vast but puzzlingly undefined epiphany in Muriel. Next to books such as John Christopher's Empty World (Dutton, 1978; o.p.) or the novels of J.G. Ballard, this one seems mild and muddled.
John Peters, New York Public LibraryCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
