The Last One by Alexandra Oliva Series: Standalone
Published by Random House Audio on 2016 July 12
Genres: Dystopia, Science Fiction
Pages: 12
Format: Audiobook
Source: Borrowed from Public Library
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Survival is the name of the game as the line blurs between reality TV and reality itself in Alexandra Oliva’s fast-paced novel of suspense.
She wanted an adventure. She never imagined it would go this far.
It begins with a reality TV show. Twelve contestants are sent into the woods to face challenges that will test the limits of their endurance. While they are out there, something terrible happens—but how widespread is the destruction, and has it occurred naturally or is it human-made? Cut off from society, the contestants know nothing of it. When one of them—a young woman the show’s producers call Zoo—stumbles across the devastation, she can imagine only that it is part of the game.
Alone and disoriented, Zoo is heavy with doubt regarding the life—and husband—she left behind, but she refuses to quit. Staggering countless miles across unfamiliar territory, Zoo must summon all her survival skills—and learn new ones as she goes.
But as her emotional and physical reserves dwindle, she grasps that the real world might have been altered in terrifying ways—and her ability to parse the charade will be either her triumph or her undoing.
Sophisticated and provocative, The Last One is a novel that forces us to confront the role that media plays in our perception of what is real: how readily we cast our judgments, how easily we are manipulated.
So I finally tried listening to my first Audiobook, something that has been on my bucket list for so long but kept on putting off because there is this unnecessary fear that I might not understand the story. As you know, English is not my native language and I have this doubt that I might be wasting my time listening to something that I would not understand because of the accent. Heh.
But anyway, I tried because first and foremost, I want to make my walking activities as productive and as less boring as possible. I already mentioned in my previous post that I am now trying my best to not be a couch potato and start incorporating movement in my day-to-day activities. So hello to the world of Audiobook. For my first Audiobook, I chose the Last One by Alexandra Oliva. It was recommended in one of the Reddit threads I’m a member of.
So how was the story as my first audiobook? Well, I found The Last One somewhat lacking. Maybe, this is just a biased opinion on my part. I might have enjoyed the story more if I had read it instead of listened to it. Oh, the narrators were fantastic but the story and characters did not grip as much as I want to. There’s this feeling of detachment so strong that I just didn’t care about the plight of our Reality TV contestants.
The Last One is a story of a survival of the fittest wherein 12 contestants were chosen to participate in Reality TV show entitled In the Dark. As we dove into the story, we get to know not only the characters but also how the production team is just rigging and manipulating every footage to get more viewers and raise hype for the show. As expected of a survival show, different challenges and obstacles were thrown at the characters for each phase of the game. There was no elimination in the rules, only punishment for the poor performers and reward for the top performing ones. The only way to get out was to utter the safe word.
Sounds exciting, noh? It might have but the scenes were crafted in a way that didn’t really made my heart pump as fast as it can. The challenges seemed relatively simplistic compared to what we have seen in the TV shows. The drama and conflict between our contenders were also passive which is kind of surprising because there are 12 of them. And everyone is stretched up to their limits. Why was there no slapping, connivance, hair pulling, shouting matches between our characters?
And the worst thing is, I got treated to Zoo’s, the main character, lengthy internal monologue about her reflections in life. Oh there is actually nothing wrong about reflecting about the choices you made in life particularly if you think that it’s your last day out there in the wilderness. I mean it’s just too excessive and doesn’t really connect with the whole narrative of the story. For several chapters, I got treated to Zoo’s melodrama about joining the survival show because she wants to have an adventure and she’s not ready to become a mother yet. And later into the story, she somewhat wants to be a mother and was missing her husband terribly. I’m not so sure, Zoo’s background is of a fulfilled woman with a loving husband, a fulfilling career and has zero problems financially and here I am listening to her moaning about everything.
So yup, 2.5 stars for The Last One. It was not overly bad but this should not have been touted as dystopia book because while there’s some mysterious plague happened in the book, it’s more of a background story than the main plot driver.