Book Review: The Boy On The Bridge by MR Carey

Once upon a time, in a land blighted by terror, there was a very clever boy. The people thought the boy could save them, so they opened their gates and sent him out into the world. To where the monsters lived.

My first thought on hearing about this book coming out was whether I was actually going to like it compared to the first book. I liked The Girl With All The Gifts for the most part-Melanie was an interesting MC, the conflict between teacher and scientist over what Melanie was worth, the military man trying to protect them all. The characters were well developed and you could even understand that the scientist felt that the death and study of Melanie was vital to saving the world. The one thing that didn't grip me was all the stuff about the fungus, especially in the last third of the book. It broke my interest in the characters and lowered my rating. So I approached this book wondering if the same thing might happen. 

My first issue was just how vague the blurb was. It gave no real clue to what the actual story was and I don't really like that when I'm trying to decide whether or not to buy a book. Was it a prequel, sequel or happening at the same time as the Melanie event? Were we going to see what happened after the end of the first book? Was it going to be about the missing crew? Was it about how the outbreak began? I don't like it when a blurb gives away all the main events in the book but I just want a little bit of information to base my decision on. Truth be told, had I known what this book was going to be about, I would've passed on it.

This book is about the crew of the research vehicle Rosalind Franklin, following on a year after the trailblazing Charles Darwin. They are following the same path, checking to see if any information can be gained from samples that were collected by the other team with little luck. This and the observation of the hungries killing a deer were pretty much all that happened in what I read of the book. The rest of it was the characters all grumbling about how much they dislike other characters and one dimensional characters going through the motions of the mission that they didn't seem to be that interested in.

The MC is Samrina Khan, a scientist who is spending the missions looking for a pharmacy to find a pregnancy test kit to confirm her fears that she got pregnant by another member of the team just before heading out on the mission. Despite having already considered an abortion earlier, she is affronted at the suggestion that she should consider it because her condition threatens the overall mission. I can't say I liked Samrina or actually cared about her pregnancy issues which takes up the whole first section of the book. The soldiers were all steriotype asshats who hate their leader for no apparant reason and are arrogant and obnoxious. I had no interest in any of them and wouldn't have cared if they had all been eaten. In fact, I can't say that I cared about any of the characters. Stephen was mildly interesting but his wanderings to observe the hungries at close quarters weren't greatly exciting either.

In fact I found the whole thing to be slow and boring. My lack of interest in the characters combined with the fact that nothing was really happening and no zombie attacks on anyone had me quitting the book after 80 pages. I don't intend to dabble in this particular world again or read anything else by the author.

Read May 2020
DNF 2 star.