'The world might not have ended all at once. But end it did. Kayla Hollins is a survivor. Living in the fragmented wasteland of the Canadian Pacific Northwest, she's outlived a colony, a cult, a paramilitary group, and most of her family. So when her younger sister April falls seriously ill, Kayla will do anything to save her. They trek to Salt Spring Island, a beacon of hope in their otherwise brutalized world, which is rumoured to still have a hospital. But Salt Spring's utopia comes with a price. Not just anyone can enter paradise or access their medical care, and Kayla's past is chequered.
'Desperate, Kayla makes a deal with Sid Charles, an aspiring politician with whom she had a chance encounter before arriving on Salt Spring. If Kayla and Sid get married, it will boost Sid's chances of election, and grant April automatic access to the medical treatment she desperately needs. And in two years, when Kayla is eligible for citizenship herself, they can get a divorce. Simple, right?
'Sid is distant and cranky, but Kayla comes to learn he is also shockingly kind. The more time she spends with him and his ragtag group of rescued boys, the more she comes to admire him. But with April's treatment and Sid's election on the line—and the constant terror of her past being discovered—Kayla isn't sure she can risk trying to change their arrangement. Trapped together in the closest thing left to paradise, Kayla and Sid both know what it means for the world to end. But as they try to rebuild with the people of Salt Spring Island, there may be time left to save—if not the world—themselves.'
I'm not much of a romance reader. This is largely down to not really enjoying genres and settings where it's real-life. The closest I'll come to reading a book that could be set in the real world is a murder mystery type story, otherwise I want fantastical things that I could never get to live myself, such as monsters, aliens, magic and the like. When I do get to read stories with romance in them they tend to be secondary to other events, a little sprinkling of romance in a story that's main focus is elsewhere. All We Have Left, despite being a post-apocalypse survival story, manages to do something of a switcheroo on me where I suddenly realised that the post-apocalypse setting was mere window dressing for a romance story; and I was shocked that I was absolutely loving the book despite of this trickery.
All We Have Left begins in the Canadian wilderness decades after the world has been ravaged by intense global climate shifts and massive earthquakes that brought civilisation as we're used to to an end. It's here that we meet two sisters, Kayla and April. Kayla is almost a decade older than her teenage sister, and has been her sole caregiver for years now since their mother was killed by other survivors. However, since April has been getting sicker and sicker Kayla has been left with no choice but to do the one thing that she never wanted to do, trust one of the communities of survivors for help.
Travelling to the island community of Salt Spring Island, Kayla and April are taken in as refugees; a process made a little bit harder by Kayla's trauma inspired panic when confronted by their armed border guards that results in her injuring one of them. On the island Kayla learns that April has diabetes, and her plan to get some quick treatment and leave falls apart as she realises that April will have to live on the island for the rest of her life. To make matters worse, Kayla doesn't know how she's going to pay for many future treatments after selling most of her possessions.
As a refugee, Kayla and April are placed with a family on the island as their sponsors, and they end up having to stay with Sid, the man that Kayla injured, after he steps forward to care for them when their future on the island is put at risk because of the injury Kayla gave him. The two sisters move into the huge farmhouse where Sid lives with several younger men and boys, all of whom came to Salt Spring with him and made a life there. As April settles into island life, going to school for the first time and dreaming of a future as a scientist, Kayla struggles to overcome past trauma, as well as a way for her to keep custody of her sister and pay for her medical bills.
Thankfully, Sid comes up with a plan that can help them and him, if Kayla marries Sid they will get citizenship, and April's treatment will be covered; and Sid gets a wife to help his public image as he attempts to enter the world of politics. With little choice left to her, Kayla enters into a sham marriage with Sid, with the understanding between the two of them that nothing has to happen between them, and after a few years time they can just divorce. However, as time goes on it becomes clear that the two of them have feelings for each other, and now must navigate the complex web of these new emotions, island politics, and past trauma.
All We Have Left drops the reader into a post-apocalypse world, one where these two young sisters are scavenging for food to survive, and the fear of raiders and thieves is always present. However, this is something that soon changes, as Kayla discovers the small community on Salt Spring Island, one that has spent decades rebuilding itself as best it can. It has a government, a hospital, a library, a busy market, and even restaurants; all things that Kayla thought lost to the end of the world. From here the book becomes almost a twisted reflection of the world we know. Instead of fighting for survival in a ravaged world we're seeing Kayla have to deal with political deals, bureaucracy, and perhaps the worst scourge of all, capitalism.
Because we see this shift through Kayla's eyes it took me a while to realise that in many ways I wasn't really reading a post-apocalypse story anymore, and Salt Spring Island and the community there could fit into almost any kind of setting with a few tweaks. The promise of reading a story set in the post-apocalypse was pretty much gone after the first couple of chapters. Luckily, I had become invested in Kayla as a character that I didn't really mind this shift, though it could have been the kind of change that would have ruined the book for me if not written as well as Emily Paxman does here.
The main draw for All We Have Left is the characters and their relationships, even beyond the central romance plot. The several boys that Sid lives with are fun and engaging characters, and seeing how they relate to each other, learning about their past, and seeing how they handle the sudden change of having two women living with them makes for an interesting premise. There's also the subplot of seeing Sid, a former outsider to the community himself, navigate the world of politics to try to change the island for the better and create a bigger, more hopeful community that could have been the focus of an entire book itself.
The romance plot is the main drive of the book, and it's handled pretty well for the most part, relying on a slow burn approach to keep the reader invested and maintain a steady amount of tension as you wonder if Sid and Kayla will wind up together or not. There are times when things don't go well for the two of them in ways that could easily be resolved by simply sitting down and talking to each other, something the characters fail to do, but this is a fairly common trope across a lot of media, so I can't really blame to book for falling into this trap at times. There does come a point where the romance suddenly speeds up, with the two of them declaring their love and talking about babies and their future together that felt way too fast; but then the book does talk about how relationships evolve pretty fast in the post-apocalypse world due in large part because people don't know how long they're going to get.
However, this sudden change of pace does play into my biggest problem with the book; it resolves too fast. Towards the back end of the book a character from Kayla's past appears on the island, someone connected to the weird cult she and her family had to escape when she was a child. This kicks off a whole new subplot about how one of Salt Spring's allies is secretly a cult, and how they've hid this from the island whilst also keeping their own people in the dark so that only those on the top can benefit. This is a big plot, one that could have huge rammifications not just for Kayla, but the entire community. This gets resolved in about two chapters, and mostly off page with the reader being told how it all worked out in an epilogue scene. We also find out how Sid's political apsiratipns go in this scene in a similar way.
The ending feels so rushed because of this. With the amount of different plots going on, the number of relationships that were being explored, the story could have easily been told across two books, with perhaps the second book exploring Kayla and Sid's relationship once they admitted their feelings, whilst also dealing with the more intense parts of Sid's desire to be in politics, and the cult. Instead it's all done very fast and given as a 'oh and this happened between chapters' info drop. I couldn't help but feel somewhat cheated by this, and I think that if Paxman wasn't going to take the time to actually explore some of these things fully then perhaps just not including the sudden cult involvement in the final few chapters would have been better as then the resolution would have simply felt fast instead of very rushed.
Despite these issues with the ending, I still really liked the book. It wasn't perfect by any means, and Salt Spring island was perhaps not the setting I was imagining it would be (I don't know why it was capitalist and that a main plot point in the post-apocalypse was April dying because Kayla couldn't pay for medical bills) but the main relationships managed to make it a really engaging read, one that I kept wanting to come back to. I came out of the book feeling like I'd been tricked into reading a book that was pretty much just all romance, but I didn't mind it at all.
All We Have Left is available now from Titan Books.
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