After the Red Rain by Barry Lyga & Robert DeFranco

Author:Barry Lyga & Robert DeFranco [Lyga, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Juvenile Fiction / Action &#38, Adventure / General, Juvenile Fiction / Social Issues / Dating &#38, Juvenile Fiction / Dystopian, Sex, Romance, Juvenile Fiction / Love &#38
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2015-08-04T07:00:00+00:00

In the morning, she realized it: The book was real.

It lay heavy on her chest, so, yes, obviously it was real. The revelation was more along the lines that the story within was real. Or at least described a version of reality. It wasn’t entirely made up.

It’s always been this way. She had said that to Rose once, and she’d believed it. Nothing she had ever seen, read, or experienced had even hinted at a better world. To the contrary: Everything she knew told her that the world had been worse, that the Red Rain and the time before it had been even more crowded, more brutal, more desperate.

But what about long ago? So long ago that no one alive today could know someone who knew someone who knew someone who lived then?

Decades, even centuries, before the Red Rain.

What had the world been like then?

There was nothing on the wikis, but she thought it might be like the world described in the book. Otherwise, what was the point of the book? It was an ancient thing, to be sure. No one possessed such things now, though now that she knew its contours so intimately, she thought that perhaps she’d seen the burnt, charred remnants of books during her scavenging. Were they all like this one? Or were they like the wikinets cast in physical form, each one a different universe, united only by language and shape?

Maybe Rose was right. Maybe the world used to be a better place. After all, if someone wanted to tell a story about a better world, wouldn’t they pretend it was the future? Or even the present? Why pretend it was in the past? What would be the point?

She flipped through the book to a passage that had captivated her, a simple description that she had read over and over, trying to envision it, suspecting she was failing: As they neared the shore and the salt breezes scurried by, he began to picture the ocean and long, level stretches of sand and red roofs over blue sea.

She closed her eyes and tried to picture it. With no frame of reference, she couldn’t be sure she was getting it right, but she hoped so.

The book, she realized, described the world that had been. Because who could otherwise imagine something like long, level stretches of sand? Just as people writing a wiki today would reflect the world around them, so, too, had the person who’d written this book reflected the world at the time of the writing.

And such a world!

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.