(no subject)

[skygiants]

I picked up Luna Harlow's Electric Shock off littlerhymes' post about it, because "a group of people Trapped in a Situation must Form A Community" is one of my absolute favorite premises.

Electric Shock is set in the near (?) future and follows a small group of people from various situations and backgrounds -- mostly teens with a few very token adults -- who have been trapped in a robot-staffed camp in a mysterious bubble for unknown and probably sinister reasons, following an explosion at the future airport.

Most of the story focuses on assortment of very different kids from very different backgrounds developing romances and friendships as they attempt to keep each other's spirits up in their creepy and distressing situation, which definitely fulfills the Form a Community part of the brief! I enjoyed a lot of the unexpected bonds between the kids, and the interesting complexity of the relationships and social alliances. On the other hand, since the most protagonist-y protagonist (Angharad, the bubbly teen heiress to a robot fortune with hidden depths) is in a coma for the first two months of the entire bubble situation and we jump into the story when she wakes up, the book kind of skims over a lot of the Trapped in a Situation survival element and I did found myself craving some more concrete and specific descriptions of how the trapped kids were handling the whole thing logistically and what kind of efforts they were making to ensure their safety and attempt to escape or solve the mystery, especially when stuff came up that I was surprised hadn't been dealt with in the first two months.

As a result, after finishing Electric Shock, I immediately went back and reread Andrea K. Host's And All The Stars, which is more or less my platonic ideal of this sort of book -- it's about a bunch of teens who get trapped together in Sydney after a Mysterious and Sinister event leaves millions of people around the world contaminated by an alien substance, and have to figure out how to survive in an ever-evolving and increasingly threatening situation.

It's a much more pandemic-y book than I remembered, tbh, or perhaps it just hits harder now that one has to a certain extent lived through the experience of being in contact with but separated from and afraid of bringing danger to one's loved ones, and disaster-prepping for being trapped in one place for an unknown period of time, and wringing as much joy as one can out of amateur theatricals and movie nights and the surprising and wonderful gift that is the friendships that develop in situations of high stress. I'm not linking to my previous write-ups because I don't know how to do it without breaking the cut-tag and spoiling the plot, but I enjoyed it as much or more on a third read as on my previous ones and I think only partially because of circumstance.

Anyway, if you know of other books like this, I am always looking for them!

Comments

[thistleingrey]

I read And All the Stars as pandemic-y within a year or two of its pub date, IIRC--it definitely has that feel for me, too.

(I think that if you link to a date page instead of that day's entry, cut-tags remain intact. Thus for example a few days ago.)

[skygiants]

I think I first mentally categorized it as apocalypse-y rather than pandemic-y, even though of course it is very much about a pandemic -- I had a 7 Seeds-shaped hole in my brain at around that time that it slotted right into, whereas, of course, now my first references are rather different.

(Thank you for the tip, that's extremely useful!)

[seekingferret]

Have you read The Grounding of Group 6 by Julian Thompson? It's one of those eighties books I was pretty sure I'd hallucinated until the internet proved that other people also believed in the hallucination. A bunch of kids are sent to a boarding school that has been paid to murder them in the woods (I don't think this is a spoiler, it's basically page one), instead they form a family and have a lot of sex and do a lot of drugs and plot revenge.

[loligo]

I was just going to mention that one. I haven't re-read it since the eighties, but it made quite an impression on me at the time.

[skygiants]

I've never heard of it, thank you for the rec!

[lirazel]

"a group of people Trapped in a Situation must Form A Community" is one of my absolute favorite premises.

Oh same! And I had never heard of And All the Stars, but I will definitely seek it out. Thank you!

Also you should watch the kdrama White Christmas for a dark (but so good!) take on this trope!

[skygiants]

Ooh, White Christmas had been on my list for a while but I hadn't actually realized this was the trope -- that shoots it significantly higher, thank you!

[lirazel]

It's definitely one of my favorite kdramas, but I don't want to overstate how much it's this trope. Because it's a dark story, the community is pretty dark, too. But I love watching these kids who don't have anything in common (and in many cases straight-up hate each other) band together for survival.

[dhampyresa]

"a group of people Trapped in a Situation must Form A Community" is one of my absolute favorite premises.
Yesssssssssssssss it's THE BEST

[libitina]

I just started watching a show, and it’s pretty amazing so far (2 episodes in) and I think you might enjoy it, too.

Demon Girl is set in 1915 and has the unknowing half-demon girl (Li Yitong) working as a singer/dancer in a nightclub to fund her sister’s tuition. Zhang Zhehan plays the police inspector, working for a living despite coming from a rich family, who notices and wants to protect her. Yalkun Merxat plays another demon who is serial killing bad people in an eccentric rich person kind of way.

Demons have gold fingernails, wings, violet eyes, and pink blood. So far it has been delightful and had some lovely outfits.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3UUwfyntghfisq02q5v2tw/search?query=demon%20girl