Ice Diaries by Lexi Revellian
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Publisher: Hoxton Press
Summary: It's 2018 and Tori's managing. Okay, so London is under twenty metres of snow, almost everybody has died in a pandemic or been airlifted south, and the only animals around are rats. Plus her boyfriend never returned from going to find his parents a year ago when the snow began - but she's doing fine. Really.
She lives in an apartment that's luxurious, if short on amenities, in a block which used to be home to rich City bankers. A handful of fellow survivors are her friends, and together they forage for food and firewood, have parties once a month and even run a book club. The problem is they have no long-term future; eventually provisions will run out. Tori needs to find transport to make the two-thousand-mile journey south to a warm climate and start again.
One day she comes across an exhausted and wounded stranger face down in the snow, and saves his life. Morgan is a cage fighter from a tougher, meaner world where it's a mistake to trust people. He's on the run from the leader of the gang he used to work with. He's disturbingly hot. And he has a snowmobile.
I happened across this one while looking for new adult titles that weren’t contemporary romances. This one is post polar apocalypse & viral outbreak set in London. In a good twist, the book really sold me on that and the survival of the small band we really get to know through Tori, our narrator. I liked her & loved that she was intelligent & capable. The romance with Morgan didn’t captivate me but I think it was because he never seemed that finely drawn a character to me. He was there for the inevitable love interest so I could only be so invested. Also, my tepid like lost a few points when the story took to making Tori’s ex a fairly unlikable. It felt like an attempt to make the case for Tori hooking up with Morgan all the more. I liked Tori for the most part & her relationships with everyone else became as important to me because of the way she related everything. Greg was my favorite. How can you not love anyone who so loves Dr Who that in the post-apocalypse names their pet rat Rosie. I smile just recalling it.
I loved the descriptions of the city & the snow. The technical realities of daily life were well thought out and very compelling as were the plans to leave & head south. It was evident that the author took care with that. That same care was also on display throughout in Tori relating the group’s get togethers & asides she would mention. By the book’s end, I was willing to deal with the tepid romance just to find out what happens next & if the group make it south. I’m invested in that & if a sequel is written, I’d want to read it. 3.5 stars.
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