The Book of Koli

As far as dystopian tales go, everybody from Mary Shelley to Ben Elton has added to the annals of the genre. So how do you conjure new stories and perspectives in this apocolyptic soup.
Well for one, you have to be Mike Carey. That could do it. With his book, The Girl With All The Gifts he managed to make a distinctive and thought provoking addition to the zombie apocalypse. With his new book ‘The Book of Koli' he adds a coming of age story set in the remnants of the Yorkshire countryside.

Koli is a young boy who lives in the fortified town of Mythen Rood. A village that is thriving despite the fact that everything and everyone is trying to kill you, or eat you or kill you and then eat you. As you can guess this is a savage world and every day is a test of survival. However, Koli is a young man who has aspirations of becoming a rampart. A member of the ruling elite who protect the village. Also, get the girl and live happily ever after. The End.

However, things do not go as planned, which is lucky for us or it would be a pretty dull book.

Now one of the first things that you will see mentioned is the language of the narrator. It is quite dense,but it wasn't to me as the language revolves around a crude broad yorkshire accent, whic is the way that I talk, so it was quite a surprise to see a book written with thsi type of prose.

Initially, the story revolves around the village and its trials and tribulations and things go well, there are loves and losses. However the story moves its settings when events ocur that change koli's life forever.

The story revolves around the main narrator Koli, who you can easily imagine being sat around a campfire telling the story to his enraptured audience. And the reader is his audience. Ursala, the technological Gandalf of the story becomes a main character that you hope will be expanded upon. The other main character of the party is Monono Aware (SE) whose charcter develop (literally) throughout.

With little snippets of information, you learn that the world that Koli and its other inhabitants live are the descendents of the remains of the human world that has been devastated by some kind of cataclysm. We are not sure when or how, but we know that nature has been turned into a voraciously savage beast and the main purpose of the ecosystem is to eat whatever it can. Even the trees have turned into carnivores and the threat of the world outside Mythen Rood looms in the background. However, nature is not the only threat.

At first, I did find the story a little sluggish, but I think that this reflects the setting. Whilst dangers threaten the life of the village, the little hamlet is as picturesque a village that could be anywhere in the English countryside with it's funny, quaint little customs. But this changes as events occur and the narrative speeds up to reflect of situation. This gear change sneaks up on you from behind and you don't realise it is there until you suddenly realise you have finished the book.

By the way, I read an advanced reading copy from the publishers - Many thanks!

Koli is annoying. His thought processing is... very limited, and he's utterly blind to any sort of consequence of actions. 400+ pages is a long time to be frustrated with the protagonist, yes? I still kind of want to read the next book of this series. I read somewhere Spinner's pov is introduced, and I'm super curious about seeing this universe from her perspective.

First, thank you to NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I had a hard time settling on a rating for this book, because my personal hangup with it is probably easily overlooked by someone else. To get the good out of the way first, the premise is extremely interesting. Here you have Koli, this country village bumpkin living within his little bubble of what he knows in what is soon revealed to be a dystopian, post-apocalyptic England. His life gets upended at some point (maybe a little further along than I would have liked) through a well-meaning but ultimately misguided attempt to acquire some “tech”, and he finds himself on quite a little adventure. The plot is fun, intense in places, and a little thought-provoking in others.

To touch on the bad, first and foremost, the book is written from the viewpoint of this uneducated country boy, with all the narrating baggage that implies. Descriptions are sometimes hard to follow because Koli doesn't always have the words to describe what he's seeing. Intentionally bad grammar abounds, because the book takes the form of him relating his adventures to you as a story. Things were also told a bit out of order in the beginning because Koli would start to relate something to you, or insinuate something, and then backtrack from it with lines akin to “but I need to tell you this first before I tell you that”. It was mildly annoying to read, at times. I also feel like some of the thought-provoking parts about civilization gone astray were heavy handed in places. Finally, the beginning sort of drags. It takes about half the book before Koli finally gets his call to action and the plot starts picking up.

So, summarizing, I ended up giving this a 3.5/5, because I had a hard time getting through the writing style to the meat underneath (maybe I'm a shallow person), and because the beginning felt like it dragged on a bit long.

4.5 *

Such a fantastic immersive story. I loved how self-referential and real-world referential this book is, and found the writing style, characters, and world building masterful and enthralling. I read the whole thing in one day, barely putting it down, and the second one is on hold at my local library already. I loved this book!