During spring break, I started to read a book called Pure by Julianna Baggot.  I haven’t finished it yet, but it is such an interesting take on the typical apocalypse stories I had to write a little about it now.

The story takes place after the Detonations, when it seems nuclear bombs had been dropped and many were killed and injured.  However, there is a Dome, where some fortunate and lucky people survived.  The wretches, the people who were outside the Dome when the Detonations hit, all have some horrible disfigurations – a doll’s head for a hand, birds fused to a back, children fused to hips and legs, scars of all kinds.  And they survive in the rubble and sooty air that is left.  At age 16, the wretches are taken and are either made a soldier, to create an army to revolt against the Dome, or used as human targets.  The ones who live in the Dome are pure – no bodily scars, no disfigurations.  And now one of the pures has escaped the Dome, something that has never happened before.  The pure is searching for his mother, who was said to die in the days after the Detonations, but he is not so sure; something his father said makes him wonder.

I am sucked into this story, and though it is depressing to think of life after nuclear warfare, I can’t wait to see what happens.  The descriptions of the wretches and their lives after a nuclear holocaust are so descriptive it makes me sure I don’t want to survive if something like that happens.  I don’t want birds fused to my back or have to breathe sooty air forever.