A review by begray
Oil and Dust by Jami Fairleigh

3.0

Listen, I love the premise of this. Post apocalpse, humanity has recategorized itself into small self sufficient communities in the ruins of a previous society. I love that. I did really like the vibes but I had several major issues. First, that the main character just keeps telling the reader about who he is, what he's like and how people perceive him and these descriptions do not seem to be supported by the text itself which is irritating. The other thing that really grates for me is that in theory we have a very simple plot of man doesn't want to settle down until he finds his family and we don't resolve that plot in 500 pages instead we spend that time wandering around trying to find out the identity of someone who seems to be placing obstacles in Matthew's way. Which fine, but we also don't resolve that. I actually don't think we resolve anything, which is annoying as hell. And then we have the world building of one of the things that made the world end is religion which doesn't exist anymore except for Christianity which is evil. Also the Christians are just straight up murdering anyone who doesn't convert which is like wild. But the thing about this that REALLY gets me is that all of the other religious are ostensibly fully gone. Like it seems like The Bible(tm) is the only surviving religious text and we managed to get Christians again (who are still called that) but there's no Jewish people, no Muslims, nobody else and within the text that's presented as a good thing and I couldn't stop thinking about that.