Above (book)

I recently started making an effort to read more to counteract the amount of media I consume passively.  At the library, I decided to try and pick a book from each shelf in an effort to expand the types of books I'm reading.  So I'm literally judging books by their covers.  Granted, I then read the blurb before making my final choice, but still...

Anyways, this is one that I choose in such a manner.  And Oh My God am I glad I did.  This book just blew me away.  I wish I had more friends so I could tell them to read it.  I do plan on buying a copy for my mother-in-law for her birthday, but that's not really the same thing.

The basic plot is that a 17 year old girl is kidnapped by the school librarian, who happens to be a crazy religious survivalist.  (Did I need to specify he was crazy?  Or did religious survivalist paint that picture well enough?  Or was it school librarian?)   After kidnapping her he locks her away in an abandoned missile silo that he has stocked to survive the impending apocalypse.

At this point I feel a little torn. I know that I said that I would not shy away from writing about things with twists, and this is a book with a lot of twists.  But I also appreciate that a plot twist in a novel is a little different than a plot twist in a movie.  Or is it?  I don't know.  So as much as I promised myself I wouldn't do it, I'm going to stop and issue a SPOILER ALERT.  If you haven't read the book yet, promise that you'll stop reading, go get it, read it, and then come back.  Done?  Alight.  I can proceed with a clear conscious.

The crazy librarian religious survivalist (yeah, that's a little redundant) ends up keeping her locked up in the silo for 17 years or so.  Although he refrains from having sexual contact with her for a number of years (that's the religious part) he ultimately ends up raping her (that's the crazy part).  He feels guilty though (religious) so he "marries" her in a ceremony that he performs himself (crazy).  Now that they're married, it's okay in his mind to keep raping her, ultimately leading to her getting pregnant and giving birth.  I'd like to point out again that she has been confined to an abandoned missile silo this entire time and has only interacted with her kidnapper the entire time.

When the boy is around 15, she ends up killing her kidnapper and the two escape.  (By the way, she names the boy "Adam", so again with the religion.)  But when they finally get to the surface, she discovers that the world did in fact end (massive nuclear meltdown) and she and her son are one of the few survivors.  And since her son has been underground the entire time, his genes haven't been effected by the radiation so he is very valuable to a government desperately trying to get people to have "normal" babies.  So there's that.

What made the book so powerful to me was that the author did an amazing job with the psychology of the whole experience.  Now, I'd like to clarify that I've never been kidnapped and impregnated by a crazy religious survivalist librarian who kept me and my child in an old missile silo for almost 20 years while the world ended.  But while reading this book I was not so sure.

In the beginning when she is first kidnapped, the girl behaves exactly like you would expect. She fights back, she tries to get away. But not totally, because she fully expects that rescue will come any day. She expects her parents or friends to say "you know what, that school librarian did seem a little crazier." And then go to the cops who will dig through old property records and discover that he owned an abandoned missile silo.

But that never happens.

So as time goes by, my hope for her rescue faded right along with hers.  And then you're left with this kind of acceptance of your fate.  Okay, she lives in a missile silo now.  Let's see her make the most of it.  Except being cut off from most human contact, not to mention the stress of the situation, she starts to become an unreliable narrator.  Her memories blend with her imagination and the past blends with the present. This section of the novel almost had a stream of consciousness quality to it.

And then at some point in the ordeal, the guy moves permanently to the silo. The girl doesn't make a huge deal out of it, but your first thought was that he started smelling (metaphorically) a little too crazy for people so he decided to retreat to his bunker.  And he's obviously crazy, so when he a group of people are poking around the silo (he has surveillance cameras) and he freaks out and starts talking about raiding parties and cannibals, she writes him off as now full blown crazy.

But after a few more events like that (he has to trade to get medicine, food is scarce) you start to wonder.  Could the world really have ended?  And then as the final desperate escape attempt is starting to unfold, you kind of almost shout at her to not go out there. Stay in the bunker where it's safe!

Then once outside, the weirdness of the landscape and environment slowly becomes apparent.  Why haven't the roads been taken care of?  Why are there now swamps in Kansas?  Why are all these cars just parked in the middle of the highway with a majority of their parts missing?  That's when you realize, probably a little before her because you're not actually living it, that the world really did end. And then the psychological hay maker.  Was getting kidnapped and locked in a missile silo for 17 years the best thing that could have happened to you?  You had ample food and water, and didn't have to worry about radiation.  You were safe.  It's a tough blow.

After that there's some end of the world type politics with the breeding programs and all that.  Doesn't carry the same weight as the previous parts, but does get into some of the psychology of parenting. Like although her son is 15, he's never experienced the world, so he's more like a toddler. And he's finally experiencing the world and she's torn between wanting to throw him back in the silo to protect him and wanting him to have a different fate than she had.

That whole part is probably deeper than I'm giving credit for here, but honestly I was so worn out and drained from the rest that I was in a daze towards the end.  My real life wife even commented how my mood was noticeably different as I read the book.

I'm definitely going to read more by the author.  Oh, I should probably mention that the author's name was Isla Morley.  Although you have the name of the book and Google.  Also, if you're still reading this than you've already read the book.  Because you promised to.