Jeffrey Caston's Reviews > Soft Apocalypse

No rating on this one because I’m too conflicted as to what to rate it. This is one of those situations where I don’t think a star-rating system works for me in this instance. There was stuff I loved and stuff I didn’t care for and they were interspersed throughout the book so I was kind of mixed overall.

When I heard an NPR story about Soft Apocalypse, I was instantly intrigued. When I got a Kindle, it was one of the first books I got. But as it happens, it got lost in the shuffle of my TBR pile and it’s just now that I got to it. I’m not sure how I would have reacted to it had I read it in 2011 when it came out instead of reading it in 2024, when some of the story takes place.

The story is told in first person and relates the journey, travails, and experiences of Jasper, an ordinary guy in Savanah, Georgia just trying to make his way into a society—and a world—that is falling apart, slowly.

There was a lot to like. On one hand, it was eerie reading events that depict a gradual decay of society before it collapses. I read a lot of it thinking, dude was prophetic… stuff he has in the book is more or less transpiring now! It was clearly very well thought out and even 13 years later, you can see the world going in this direction if we, as humans, don’t get our act together. The book had some very very powerful moments and parts where I personally felt the narrative was so chilling, while also credible, it will stick with me. One such scene was (view spoiler)[when Jasper sees Ange getting killed by the farmers from whom they are trying to steal. (hide spoiler)] That scene is going to stay with me for a long time. The tone and actions by Jasper and his tribe had a degree of credibility because it was a bunch grouped into a nomadic “tribe” as they put it without discernible survival skills to start because they had built up their lives to participate in a society that was no longer functioning according to plan. It doesn’t flinch from the smaller-scale cruelty and death created by desperate people, which also gave the story some credibility. It makes you, as a reader, think how you would approach the same circumstances. There are things I would have done differently than Jasper and his group did, but that was what helped it feel immersive at certain stages.

But I kept thinking it should have been more enthralling in parts than it really was. There were parts that held my attention, but a lot that were like a bit blasé to me. The chapters were really long. That affected the pace to me. I get that it might have been intentional to tell the story in long stages in order to create the sense of exhaustion and weariness that Jasper was feeling. but then I felt like it also should have been more tension, with things happening quickly and out of control. It left me, throughout a lot of the book not feeling as strongly as I should have been. However, there were parts, mostly toward the end where society truly had gone past the tipping point and was falling into total chaos.

Another thing I wasn’t crazy about was Jasper’s personality. There’s no delicate way to put this diplomatically but (view spoiler)[dude was thinking with his dork way too much. Guy can barely feed himself, world’s falling apart, people are feeding him nasty stuff, gangs are taking over, but yet he’s thinking of how much he was sexually attracted to a woman. I can understand it to a point, because if you have no discernible future, you don’t know if you are going to survive much longer, and you have questionable housing situation. But it just felt contrived in a lot of the book. (hide spoiler)] That could just be my opinion. I also wasn’t crazy about the ending but it (view spoiler)[allowed for the reader to think about how the world will ultimately turn out and to think about whether Jasper and Phoebe made the right decision. (hide spoiler)]