I've always been a huge fan of Katherine Applegate's Animorphs and Everworld series, and enjoyed every re-reading. It never occurred to me until recently to pick up Remnants, partly because no fan of Applegate ever talked about the series. After reading the first book, I think I know why.
Plot Summary
The world is ending. Not because of a nuclear meltdown or global warming, which is presumably under our own control, but for cataclysmic events out of our control.
Namely...
Hopelessly underprepared, humanity's last ditch effort to preserve a smidgen of Earth is to send 80 people aboard the spaceship Mayflower. They will be put into hibernation pods as the spaceship hurtles millions of light-years into space to find a new world on which to settle.
My Reactions
The five harrowing days of panic and hopelessness leading up to the launch of the Mayflower make up a majority of the book. And it is massively depressing. I guess it's a credit to the author's writing that while I'm not an extinctionist by any means, her portrayal of the end of the world made me wonder what humanity could do when faced with something like this.
The movie Armageddon proposed drilling a hole into a meteorite the size of Texas and detonating a nuclear bomb inside of it. That granted some measure of comfort until my Astro professor likened it to dropping a nuclear bomb into a mile-deep hole actually in Texas. Would Texas split down the middle from that one measly bomb?
No, not this time, Bruce!
I found that the characters were blander than in Animorphs or Everworld. Alternating perspectives introduce us to the main players, but it is initially difficult to differentiate them. This is one of the main reasons why I did not enjoy the book as much. If all of humanity has died except for these few people, I want them to be extraordinarily interesting. With the exception of the First Son in whom I see the makings of another Visser Three type character, none of the others held my attention for long.
Overall, I did not enjoy the book very much. Again, the writing itself is not bad--as always, the author's style is no frills and harshly realistic. But the characters were too swallowed up in the intensity of the story for me to continue past this book. I may pick up the second book sometime in the future and see if that salvages the series for me, but in the meantime, 2 STARS and recommended for people who are (1) diehard fans of Katherine Applegate, or (2) can handle realistic depictions of the end of the world.
Now, excuse me while I make massive donations to NASA's meteorite detection fund.
