Geth Montego only has three friends. There's her best friend Tovah, who's been acting weird ever since they started applying to the same colleges. Then there's Diego, who she wants to ask to prom, but if she does it could ruin everything. And there's the K-pop band BTS, who she's never seen up close but she's certain she'd be BFFs with every member of the group if she ever met them for real.
Then Geth's small town of New Rochelle, New York, becomes the center of a virus sweeping the world. Schools are closed, jobs are lost, and the only human contact she has is over Zoom. After a confrontation with cops, Geth gets caught up in the Black Lives Matter movement and finds herself having to brave the dangers she's spent months in quarantine trying to avoid.
Geth's friends, family, and hometown are upended by the pandemic and the protests. Geth faces a choice: Is she willing to risk everything to fight for her beliefs? And what exactly does she believe in, anyway?
2020 was probably the most significant year we'll see in a long time. Fiction set in that time is starting to arrive on our shelves now. And I can definitely say, this is - one of those.
There isn't really a plot, as such. It's an almost day by day narration of Geth's life as the Covid crises looms, crashes, peaks and retreats (a bit). Geth's mother is an ER nurse so Geth knows better than most how things are going. It doesn't help that her mother's boyfriend has decided to move his ex-wife's son in, and into Geth's bedroom besides.
There's a scene relatively early on that kind of exemplifies my problem with this book. Geth is thinking about Donald Trump, the then president, but rather than uses his name she uses a variety of names of villians from Game of Thrones, never the same name twice, and doesn't explain this decision until right at the end of the section. Believe it or not, there are people out there who didn't watch Game of Thrones, wouldn't have picked up those names, and thus would have spent that whole section wondering who all these people that Geth was angry at are. If the explanation had come first, things would have been better.
I didn't hate this book, it isn't awful, but it's probably not one I'll revisit, sadly.
Zero O'Clock publishes on the 7th September, 2021. I received a free copy and am giving an honest review.
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