Kingdom of Needle and Bone
Mira Grant
Golly. I really did not like this one at all, at all. Some time ago I embarked on a project of reading everything that Seanan McGuire has published, including the works under the Mira Grant pseudonym. I am a huge McGuire fan, as you might guess, but I have found the Mira Grant oeuvre a tough slog, and this was one of the worst. Really, the best thing about it is that it's short.
Kingdom of Needle and Bone has a lot in common with the Newflesh series, in that the plot is predicated on a very dangerous virus outbreak. The virus in Kingdom of Needle and Bone is a variant of measles virus, which is, in point of fact, one of the worst viruses in history, even though its effects on Europeans are tempered by centuries of coexistence. In Kingdom of Needle and Bone the measles virus is mutated so as to abrogate that historical protection. The outbreak begins in the USA where, because of the antivax movement, many people are not vaccinated against measles, so the virus finds a foothold.
The book is thus full of long, bitter screeds against the antivax movement. While I personally have no patience with antivaxers, I found these tirades tiresome. From there we progress to a Utopian plot (about which I will say no more to avoid spoilers).
The book ends, in literally the last two pages, with a plot twist I absolutely hated. It was completely implausible and inconsistent with the nature of the characters we had come to know. It struck me as having been thrown in purely for shock value, not because the story in any way needed it.
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