Dark, dirty, and dystopian with strong female characters, this novel might be a challenging read but one well worth the time to do so.

There are some novels that when you finish them, you have to sit and take a moment to think back over the journey you were just taken on. A Song For the End of the World by Jason Furhman is definitely one of them. Following the plights of two sisters and their mother, don’t pick this up expecting the wrongfully pristine apocalypse Hollywood often portrays. Here, the end of the world is gross, and violent, and oddly…poetic.

Mostly following the elder of the two sisters, the disjointed landscape comes to us through the lens of Mia first. In her late teens, she remembers a world before the horrors of the present, and that juxtaposition of the before and the now often makes scenes that much more jarring. Scattered between the chapters following Mia, her younger sister is also a point of view character. Her childish imagination painting over the world around her enhances the harsher realities described in the other chapters.

With a sparse cast of characters, there is very little dialogue meaning that the vast majority of the novel is the description of the world and what happens in it through the eyes of both of these sisters. Such a focus might be problematic if that description wasn’t so well done, the turn of phrase or word choice close to masterful in most places. The lenses through which the reader views the world, one sister and then the other, are also distinct, with their own strong character voices.

What prevents me from giving it a LOVED IT! though is that same description and a strange instability Mia exhibits at points. I would say describing the landscape is very important in a dystopian novel, but describing the same strip of land or scene multiple times at length can bog the story down. Even if I praised it earlier (and it deserves enormous amounts of praise), there’s just a bit too much of it really. With Mia, her much younger sister seems to exhibit significantly greater emotional maturity.

If you appreciate a darker story with strong female leads, I wouldn’t hesitate to pick this one up. There are some extremely strong story elements at play though, including graphic descriptions of violence, injury, and rape.

A Song for the End of the World by Jason Furhman is available to buy on Amazon or you can visit the author’s website to find out more about this and their other works.

Verdict:

READABLE