Title: Deadlands

Author: Victoria Miluch

Release date: September 12, 2023

Right off the bat, I have to give credit to my pal Julie aka @grimdreadful over on IG for even putting this book onto my radar in the oddest way ever!

Did you know you can get a free Kindle book with Prime every month? I didn’t, lol! Not until Julie posted a Tik Tok about snagging her free Kindle book. I went and sure enough, Amazon had six or eight books available for me to choose from. I went through the various books and out of all of them, this one interested me the most.

The book itself is a fairly straight-forward novel about isolation and the struggle to survive, which are two big boxes I always look to check off when I’m choosing a book.

What I liked: Set in the near future, the novel follows Georgia, a nineteen-year-old female who lives with her father and brother, in the middle of nowhere near Phoenix. The world isn’t how it is today. Temperatures have skyrocketed, the air is hard to breathe in cities and a lot of the US is simply on fire. The government has decided to build up instead of out, wanting to build domes for people to live in, with fresh air, drinkable water and all the resources that have faded away over the years.

One day, two strangers arrive where Georgia and Wulf (her brother) live and it’s there that the novel ramps up. Now, I have to admit, having been a horror reader my entire life, I immediately distrusted these two. I was thinking Tremblay’s ‘Cabin…’ or the movie ‘The Strangers’ type scenarios the entire time I was reading it, which made it harder for me to relax and enjoy some of the coming-of-age moments Miluch shared throughout, especially as Georgia comes to understand that she wants to be ‘out there,’ to see the wider world, and not live in isolation and fear.

Her father is an interesting character. I’m not sure if anyone reading this has ever watched the kids animated show Dinosaur King, but all I could picture the dad looking and sounding like was Dr. Z, the bad guy of the show! Ultimately, the character is suspicious, untrusting and anti-government. He wants to do what’s best for his family, but is haunted by events from the past.

As the novel goes on, we get a welcome change of scenery, an introduction of another character, Herm, and when the ‘big moment’ that changes everything occurs, we see how it effects Georgia and how she reacts to it.

The ending will be very divisive for readers. It’ll either work for you or it won’t. For me, I enjoyed it and it felt like a really nice way of sending Georgia off into the larger world, but without an expectation of a sequel.

What I didn’t like: As mentioned, you may find the ending to be a bit smooth, or like a song fading away, but I personally didn’t mind it.

What I didn’t like was the very obvious set up that a moment of intimacy was, as well as a very odd event involving Georgia’s father and one of the visitors in the woods. It’s a throw away moment over all, with her finding them doing something ‘adult,’ let’s say, but it really added nothing to the story. The other event, was fairly telegraphed early on that it would play a significant role later on in the progression, so much so, that when it does happen, it’s a bit of a let down.

Why you should buy it: If you’re looking for a cinematic story of a young girl trying to find her own way in the world, look no further. Miluch has really created an engaging world, a great cast of characters and the internal struggle between devotion to family and the longing to break away and find ones self was wonderfully done.

4/5