Mweh. I finished it. So I guess it was entertaining enough for me to invest that much time in it. But I can't really recommend it. I didn't like the main character. I realise I'm not cutting her any slack, but I thought she was selfish and dumb. Maybe in real life I would have been more sympathetic, certainly about her mental issues. But it got annoying to read about. She wants life to be easy, let's everyone take care of her, and is selfishly dishonest.
Supposedly being alone in the world is liberating, at least according to the blurb, but I didn't see it. She may realise what some of her faults are, but without other people present she is incapable of repeating them, so I'm not convinced she ever learned anything.
Freeing a few dogs and then stopping because one of them snaps at you? Seriously, taking a car and driving in the middle of the night when there is no support system left? Then forgetting about gasoline?
Plain stupid and selfish. And yeah, I know the world just ended. But she's just not an admirable person in any way. I don't get why people chose to be her friend. Maybe because she was needy and they wanted to take care of her. I really don't know.
This was not a book for me. ( )

DNF at 39% because I'm not sure where this is going and I'm a bit traumatised about how she's treating this poor golden retriever.

Last One at the Party presents the reader with a story that's essentially a hyperbole of our current reality. A pandemic sweeps the world unchecked by attempts to constrain it. But instead of leaving most people merely inconvenienced, 6DM kills everyone in its path. Almost everyone. fewer than one in a million survive it.

Our nameless heroine is pretty much the worst possible person to survive something like this. She's selfish, tedious, insipid. She wilfully condemns various helpless animals to death, acknowledging their desperation and then moving on. Not since Heathcliff and Catherine have I come across main characters I hated so intensely.

As we get to know her, we see she's been battling severe depression and crippling anxiety for years even before the pandemic. Add PTSD after the fact and, well, she doesn't cope well. But she definitely shows emotional growth over the course of the book – it just takes her a long, long, loooooong time to get there.

It reminded me a lot of Anne Corlett's The Space Between the Stars.

To be honest, I'm not certain whether I actually liked this book. For a solid 90% of it, I despised the main character. But I'll tell you what: I could not put it down. And I've got such a serious book hangover from it, that I haven't been able to get into another book since. ( )

As I walked back from the shop, I became aware that the street was rammed with parked cars. I’d had to leave the Defender in the middle of the road because all the parking spaces were taken, a fact that I hadn’t registered at the time because I was getting used to driving and parking wherever took my fancy. I wandered down the road trying to figure where everyone had been going. I didn’t have to walk far. I turned the corner and there they were. Perhaps a thousand, maybe more. It must have been some kind of local football club or community centre. There was a long, low building on one side and they had erected a stage at the front of the space. There was no one on the stage (that I could see), just a huge digital clock (now blank) and a massive banner that read ‘Together’. And about a thousand dead bodies.

Not one of my favourite post-apocalyptic novels as I didn't warm to the main character, although Lucky the dog was lovely. ( )

I hated this so much. It had such an interesting premise of the last person alive after the world was wiped out by a deadly virus called 6DM (6 days maximum - that's how long people survived for after contracting it), it even referenced COVID-19 in 2020 which was admittedly pretty anxiety-provoking to read. But the main character is a wet noodle of a person and half of the book is just flashbacks to her boring ass life where she made stupid life decisions, and the other half is her just wandering aimlessly after everyone died. I find it so unrealistic that she wouldn't end her life when there is a pill available to do so peacefully. She's so passive and indecisive that she couldn't even do that. It also has my most hated trope of pregnancy during an apocalypse. I skimmed through big chunks of the book with animal suffering and cruelty. The ending was very also bleh. I want to unread this. ( )