Never have I connected so deeply to a book’s testament to the experience of living, with our protagonist trying and define what it means to be human, doing so based on only secondhand approximations of life before and the knowledge that she could never connect to such an experience, being both deeply connected to and alienated from others who managed to keep some recollections of what normalcy had been.

She plays a role crucial to the narrative as the youngest, being granted knowledge by her elders and eventually outliving them to share her own experience, and sees her predicament in a different lens than others with her, often in a way that couldn’t be accepted based on prior norms but was necessary to survive, and to keep others from suffering in the desolate world they had found upon escaping.