The Ballad of Ami Miles by Kirsty Dallas Alley

It's an honor to live in the Compound, the only safe place left after the barren plague swept the world. Ami knows that, just as she's always known her destiny is to procreate as soon as she's able. But when the time comes, she finds it hard to allow it.

It's hard to summarize this book, because it is so many things. It's a look at a world a long way from here, a hundred years into an almost total plague of barrenness. It's a look at women in cults and how hard it can be to forget the lessons we learn in childhood. It's a beautiful coming of age story. And though I can't say it's exactly fun, I really enjoyed it.

Post apoc is my favourite genre and I really enjoyed looking at this one, at how two different groups have reacted; one by drawing in, being smaller and insular, and one by opening themselves to others, being friendly and welcoming and blossoming as a result. It's a look at what people thought was important, years into this slow apocalypse.

I loved reading about Ami's slow acceptance of a wider world and a different way of thinking, that she didn't just jump straight into believing what her new friends did. I'd love to read more set in this world, but if this is all we get, I'm happy with it.

By the time I made it back to the big patio behind the lodge, the sun was setting. From that angle it looked like a big fiery ball dropping right into the lake. I stood and watched it until the last burning edge disappeared into the water, then I turned around and noticed other, smaller fires burning here and there beyond the hard edge of the patio. It wasn’t cool enough for big fires, but small ones helped keep the mosquitoes away from the groups of people that still sat talking and laughing around them. I felt a shy quietness come over me as I looked at all those people again. Was I welcome in any of those circles? Was there a place for me at one of those little fires? 

Then I heard a sound that was not like anything I had ever heard before. There had been singing of hymns back home, so I knew that I was hearing music, but this music didn’t come from human throats. I followed it to one group around a fire at the far end from where I had been standing, and I saw that it came from a sort of curvy wooden box with a hole and strings across it and a long handle sticking up with the strings going all the way to the top. And this musical box was being cradled in the lap of a girl whose hands seemed to play the strings at both ends. She was looking at her hand at the top of the handle, and her hair fell across her face in a long, smooth sheet, black as a crow’s wing and shining in the light of the fire. Then she turned her face to look off into the darkness, and she started to sing.

A teen girl, raised in isolation, must journey through a post-apocalyptic landscape to find her long-lost mother in this moving YA novel of self-discovery.

Raised in isolation at Heavenly Shepherd, her family’s trailer-dealership-turned-survival compound, Ami Miles knows that she was lucky to be born into a place of safety after the old world ended and the chaos began. But when her grandfather arranges a marriage to a cold-eyed stranger, she realizes that her “destiny” as one of the few females capable of still bearing children isn’t something she’s ready to face.

With the help of one of her aunts, she flees the only life she’s ever known and sets off on a quest to find her long-lost mother (and hopefully a mate of her own choosing). But as she journeys, Ami discovers many new things about the world—and about herself.