Review: Unlucky Evens, Cursed Odds by Bill Adams

Rating: /10

Synopsis:

The hateful Path, that of the 9th Born.

The survival of the Ark—humanity’s last bastion after God’s wrath destroyed the world—is balanced by birth order: the oddborn are assigned a Path, the evenborn are given over to the will of God. And it is upon those of the 9th Born Path to sanitize the evens.

John 59129’s first walk as a Niner is the same day the scientists of the Ark plan to defy God by seeking to turn back time. An electrical surge sends John past the safety of the Ark, into an unblemished world. A glimpse of perfection. Of all the evenborn saved.

But when John wakes, he’s back in the Ark, twenty years after the failure to harness time. Was his encounter real or just a dream caused by his accident? Are those in charge of the Ark keeping the oddborn caged? Is God the monster, or is it mankind?

For John 59129 to find out before his own child is born, he must be willing to play the odds.

Review:

I picked this up on audiobook, expecting it to be sitting in my library for a while. However, a brief listen to the first few minutes and I was hooked into the world of the Ark, and John, as he faces a harrowing role designed to maintain the population of the self-contained building as the world continues to die around them. Unlucky evens.

It is hard to review this novella without spoiling the plot structure, and that is vital to your enjoyment of this story. John is on a passage of discovery, both about himself and how the Ark is run, and for whose benefit. That journey is emotionally harrowing at times, thick with twists that play with the concept of time, and it is the connecting of these events that we experience through John. We make the same leaps of understanding as he does, while experiencing a sense of vertigo as the enormity of it all strikes home. This novella comes highly recommended, and the narrator gets the tone just right.

An excellent read, different in style to a previous book I read by the same author, but no lesser for it. The prose flows superbly, and the story is tightly told. Read it!