Blog Tour stop for this thrilling and captivating, just a bit to close to home read
#TheWaitingRooms #BlogTour #AntibioticResistance @evecsmith @OrendaBooks @RandomTTours #RandomThingsTours
"NO DRUGS. NO MIRACLES. JUST FEAR."
Synopsis
Decades of spiralling drug resistance have unleashed a global antibiotic crisis. Ordinary infections are untreatable, and a scratch from a pet can kill.
A sacrifice is required to keep the majority safe: no one over seventy is allowed new antibiotics.
The elderly are sent to hospitals nicknamed ‘The Waiting Rooms’ … hospitals where no one ever gets well.
Twenty years after the crisis takes hold, Kate begins a search for her birth mother, armed only with her name and her age. As Kate unearths disturbing facts about her mother’s past, she puts her family in danger and risks losing everything.
Because Kate is not the only secret that her mother is hiding. Someone else is looking for her, too.
Sweeping from an all-too-real modern Britain to a pre-crisis South Africa, The Waiting Rooms is epic in scope, richly populated with unforgettable characters, and a tense, haunting vision of a future that is only a few mutations away.
My Review
It would be a lie if I don't admit when reading this that I did not question if the author had some sort of crystal ball or psychicness!?
This read seems so fitting for the current time, I imagine my head and thoughts of this book would have been entirely diffrent just 5 short months ago, before lockdown before the world experianced an out break like this.
While this read is of course fiction its base and thought proviking mesaage sing loud in this time.
In this read we meet Kate, she lives in London and works as a nurse, so much so normal, but this world is based 20 years after "The Crisis" this was a gobal pandemic, millions of lives were lost and life changed forever for those who survived.
The world is plaged by antibiotic resistance, a simple scratch can kill you, simple infections wipe out thousands and now the worlds in a police state. The over 70's are denided antibiotic medication instead they are sent to hospitals known as The Waiting Rooms as they in the end wait for death or in some cases sign up for it.
Of course many are against this some try to fight back but are silenced, the world is nothing that it was before.
Kate's role is to help people to die, more shockingly these people mosty older but some young with chronic conditions have agreed to die they sign there literal lives away.
Yet now she is on a quest of her own adopted as a child her adoptive mother has just passed away and now Kate has desised to try and track down her birth mother. The information she has is little but Kate really is unprepared where this jouney will take her and she has absolultly no idea of the risks she is about to take.
As a reader I do love a good dystopian read and this one had it all, like I say it would be ignoring the elephant in the room if I did not say that this read was 1000 times more chilling and the undertone even darker with the current sistuation as a background for the reader.
I am a spoiler free blog and I do not want to say more on the plot but the characters were electric and i just willed them along I loved both Kate and Lily the empethy I felt and emotive writing around there lives just endeared me to the story. While this read has so put packed into it it never felt rushed more complexly woven where the thrills and tension were ramped up at just the right times!
This read was nothing short of terrifying in its plausablility, chilling, dark and though provoking, this is a scarly close to home look at a dytopian future that feels in its history and start far to familier.
Author Bio
Eve Smith's debut novel The Waiting Rooms was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize First Novel Award.
Eve writes speculative fiction, mainly about the things that scare her. She attributes her love of all things dark and dystopian to a childhood watching Tales of the Unexpected and black-and-white Edgar Allen Poe double bills. Eve's flash fiction has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and highly commended for The Brighton Prize.
In this world of questionable facts, stats and news, she believes storytelling is more important than ever to engage people in real life issues.
Eve recently contributed a piece of flash fiction, Belting Up, to an anthology of crime shorts called Noir From the Bar. The collection of stories has been launched to raise money for the NHS.
Eve's previous job as COO of an environmental charity took her to research projects across Asia, Africa and the Americas, and she has an ongoing passion for wild creatures, wild science and far-flung places. A Modern Languages graduate from Oxford, she returned to Oxfordshire fifteen years ago to set up home with her husband.
When she's not writing, she's chasing across fields after her dog, attempting to organise herself and her family or off exploring somewhere new.
Follow Eve: @evecsmith on Twitter & www.evesmithauthor.com
Instagram: evesmithauthor
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Thank you to the Publisher and Author for sending me an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) of this novel and for the opportunity to review these works.
All reviews are my own unbiased opinion.