In a weird coincidence, like Buddy, this book has links to my own school life as well as being a find in the book cupboard. I didn't read Z for Zachariah when I was at school, but we did do Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH written by the same author. And I hated it. Looking back, one has to wonder why I liked English so much because I pretty much hated all the books I did until GCSE - a trend which is kind of reflected in my own teaching to date. I just remember Mrs Frisby being so stupid and irritating so why I thought this would be any different is beyond me.
This was worse. I couldn't believe it was as bad as it got in the last seventy or so pages. Until that point I had sort of been bobbing along with it, feeling that it wasn't very suitable as a reader at school, but was actually quite interesting. Set in a post-nuclear world, it's the story of a girl who survives when everybody else doesn't and what happens when a strange man arrives. It is a slow starter but when he suffers from radiation poisoning it gets a bit more interesting. After that, it just becomes odd: he becomes all sinister and she is uneasy, but spends most of the rest of the novel detailing her efforts to plant crops and tend the land. I have to be honest in that I skim read the end of this and feel almost no guilt in doing so. I was so bored.
Disappointing and now I have to decide whether we keep the books or not. Whatever, they'll be buried away on a top shelf at the very most.
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