There's a certain kind of book that's absolute cat nip to me: Dark, unsentimental, and bleak.

It's a package deal. Without the lack of unsentimental distance, you get into attempts at being edgy and a lot of purple prose. A lot of dark and bleak content falls down for me due to this, because it gets so bogged down in its own feelings. A healthy distance let's the darkness and horror reverberate in the minds of the reader, not telling them how they should interpret something awful.

This book breaks from a lot of the typical post-apocalyptic conventions. The plague in the story causes a massive gender imbalance, which serves to highlight how horribly sexist things would get with a post-apocalypse where men greatly outnumber women. Some of this stuff would probably happen anyway, but a lot of stories kind of sidestep the issue, because a lot of these authors don't realize how awful men can be when consequences are off the table.

The story also avoids a lot of the standard cliches in structure. Normally the character meets groups of survivors, then they move through different groups and places, the appointed leader arguing with a redneck and/or religious zealout who disagrees with every plan to keep the drama and internal conflict cheap and easy.

Once the main character realizes she's in danger by sheer virtue of her gender, she sidesteps most of this, spending most of the story learning to survive better and being as cautious around others as humanly possible. These kinds of stories don't often deal with how a true loner would deal with a broken world (so called loners like Mad Max and the Gunslinger gather sidekicks like barnacles) so it was refreshing to see an introvert manage these issues.

I was a bit leery when I saw that this book was a part of a series, but it actually ends on a satisfying note, and the sequel appears to branch out into another character, so I will most likely be continuing on.