The story is very well written and also engaging, which is impressive because the first third deals with a rather boring look at a rather boring life. This is to be expected, as most day-to-day lives are boring. We wake up, we go to jobs we’d rather not do, we carry on at conversations we’d rather not have. But the strength of Merriam’s writing is that this day-to-day tedium holds as much poetry and resonance and insight as the more tense scenes later in the story, after the epidemic has been revealed.

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