Review of ‘1/2986’

Posted on July 23, 2016 Updated on July 20, 2016

Mickaela isn’t a good student. She’s a crackerjack mechanic, but as a girl, and a poor student to boot, there’s no way she’ll be allowed to work as a mechanic. So, she’s decided she might as well kill herself. Then, visiting the generator, she encounters the new Sequencer, an enigmatic official who is feared and respected by everyone in the scattered settlements, which are all that’s left of Earth’s population. She’s stunned when he suggests that she consider becoming his apprentice, a position that means the village idiot would become the most respected resident—and, her family will finally have reason to be proud of her. She accepts, with some trepidation, which is completely warranted, because she might not even survive the apprenticeship.

1/2986 by Annelie Wendeberg is a post-apocalyptic novel of an Earth that has been almost depopulated. What’s left of humanity is consigned to small settlements where obeying the rules, no matter how senseless, is the most valuable trait, and the only people with a sense of the world as an entity are the Sequencers; mysterious people who move from settlement to settlement, ‘inspecting,’ and who knows what else. A fantastic tale that rings true.

I give this one four stars.