December 23, 2023
★★★★☆
The story of Wanderers by Chuck Wendig is immediately engaging. The first pages open with a girl walking out of her house and… not stopping. That’s immediately weird and doesn’t let up, scoping up the weirdness and the world’s reaction to it gradually over 800 pages. A kind of plausible, if exaggerated, near-future science fiction.
I did really enjoy it and felt it was a huge story told well, balancing a ton of things large and small, that would have toppled with a lesser writer. I only deduct points for occasional bits of unevenness and distracting forgotten details.
It’s part The Last of Us, part The Stand, part Yellowstone, and part The Matrix. It mixes in the biggest stories in technology and politics in the last half a decade, not to mention the pandemic. It weaves in complex relationships and love stories. It’s doing a lot and manages to keep it exciting and the stakes high, including the story itself. With this much going on a wimpy ending would have wrecked it, but I found it very satisfying.
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