The Pharmacist by Rachelle Atalla

THE BUNKER IS DESIGNED TO KEEP THEM ALL SAFE.

In the end, very few people made it to the bunker. Now they wait there for the outside world to heal. Wolfe is one of the lucky ones. She's safe and employed as the bunker's pharmacist, doling out medicine under the watchful eye of their increasingly erratic and paranoid leader.

BUT IS IT THE PLACE OF GREATEST DANGER?

But when the leader starts to ask things of Wolfe, favours she can hardly say no to, it seems her luck is running out. Forming an unlikely alliance with the young Doctor Stirling, her troubled assistant Levitt, and Canavan - a tattooed giant of a man who's purpose in the bunker is a mystery - Wolfe must navigate the powder keg of life underground where one misstep will light the fuse. The walls that keep her safe also have her trapped.

How much more is Wolfe willing to give to stay alive?

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Forgive me if this review is a little jumbled; I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this book.

First of all, and this is an important one; it's written without any quotation marks, or anything to delineate speech. This leads to things like

We can't talk here. She looked around the room. Someone might be listening.

No one's listening here, I said. It's safe.

Maybe.

I've made up those lines for demonstration purposes, but look at that third one. Because the whole novel is narrated from inside Wolfe's head, there's nothing to say whether that's her thought or something being said by someone else. And as often happens in proof books, some of the paragraphs ran together, which meant that every so often I had to stop, go back and dig through a section to try and figure out logically who was saying what. Now this is a proof and it's possible that in the actual book, there will be something to mark out the speech; but it's also possible there won't be, so just be aware of that.

The actual story is great. I was feeling more and more claustrophobic and hemmed in as time went on. I do wish there had been a little more backstory; something happened about seven months before the start of the story, probably something nuclear, and 0.2% of the city's population is crammed into this bunker to wait for three years for the world up top to be safe again. There may be other bunkers, or that might be a comforting lie. (I ran those numbers: the city nearest me has a population of about 544K, and 0.2% of that would be 1100 people. For New York, on the other hand, 0.2% is closer to 400K. Let's put the bunker population somewhere between those two.) The preparation seems to have been a little haphazard; there's plenty of anti depressants, although not enough to cover the whole population for the whole three years; there are decorations for a nursery, although reproduction is forbidden and in fact women have contraceptive implants; but everyone is living on packets of nutritious mush in different flavours, and there doesn't seem to have been any attempt at setting up a growing area or bringing in chickens. People sleep on bunks stacked four high in huge halls and have very little privacy.

I did love the basic idea, though. It had never occurred to me that medical personnel would be that busy in that kind of situation, although of course they'd want to catch anything infectious very quickly. It's a really clever position to put someone in to allow them to see most people regularly without actually being noticed. Who pays attention to a retail worker?

Spoilers below: 

Part of the plot involves a huge wall that can divide the bunker into two equal parts, ostensibly to protect against an infectious disease. At one point it comes down and does not go back up, blocking the two halves off from each other and stranding people on the 'wrong' side. Except the leader's rooms specifically open into both sides, and he's had plenty of women in there over the year or so that's happened so far. Why do none of them suggest using it to get back to their own side?

Overall I really enjoyed this. I'd love to see what happens after the three years, but if Rachelle chooses to move on and write something else, I'll be there for that too.

The Pharmacist publishes on the 12th of May, 2022. I received a free copy and am giving an honest review.