FINALLY.
Finally a series opener that has me excited and practically salivating for the following books.
Demitria Lunetta has a new fan in me and I am ready to bring a horde of teens (and adults) with me.

Amy Harris is alone in her parent's upscale Lincoln Park home Before, watching television and eating a snack. She's mildly annoyed when the television goes out, switching to an emergency statement about some "alien attack". As the day progresses, and she can't contact her friends or parents, she suddenly realizes that it could very well be that they're all dead. She's alone. Safe, protected by her eco-friendly father's solar-powered home, and her mother's government-minded electrified fence; but alone.

She hides from reality behind the walls of protection built by her parents, but eventually there is no food, and she must find a way to venture out beyond the safety of her home. She learns that They do not like noise, and cannot see very well at night, and soon she has scavenged successfully from the nearby homes and stores. It's on one such trip that she finds a small toddler, no older than three, who is alone and hungry in a grocery store. Children are loud, and if this one makes a sound, Amy will leave her in an instant, but she quickly finds that Baby is a silent and welcome companion for the end of the world.

They live successfully for three years, growing to communicate and love one another as sisters, and sometimes as a parent would a child. They can live like this forever. Or so she thought. Soon, they find that they are not the only humans to survive in The After, but also that it may have been better to remain living as though they were.

Oh my goshness.
First of all, I want Amy Harris to meet Katniss Everdeen and have a party together with super-slick combat clothing and whatnot. Then I'd want them to stumble upon Michael from The End Games by T.Michael Martin, and then just rule the world. I need that to happen.

Okay, so yeah, Amy is amazing. Her view of the post-apocalyptic world was so honest and raw that I felt heavy with her worry and grief. I loved her thought processes, and her ability to rationalize her actions, even when they were clearly something she would have frowned upon in the Before. I understand why the author made her repeatedly define her relationship with Baby as a sister, but she was clearly parental with her. I LOVED them together.

Amy's memories of her friends, her constant but relevant Shakespeare references inspired by the memory of her father, and her kick-ass survival instincts were captivating. If They came today, I'd want to trek over to Lincoln Park looking for her. But make no mistake, while the book is pegged as a "Chicago" novel, reminiscent of Divergent, it isn't. Chicago is not as much of an organism as I thought it would have been, or even could have been.

And to just be plain, the book was written well. Demitria Lunetta was able to write out times of mundane fear and apprehension with just as much passion as those times of action. The second half of the book jumps back and forth between what Amy knows and what she remembers, and it gently nudged readers towards the end, without letting too much out at first. After reading a few books recently that seemed to be so excited about their endings that they wanted to give them to me early, I appreciated that.

Fans of Across the Universe by Beth Revis would adore this Amy. I certainly did.