Orleans

In the wake of all the hurricanes, blizzards, tornadoes, and other natural disasters around the world, Orleans possesses an almost frightening reality. Orleans, tells the story of what happens after New Orleans is struck by super storm after super storm. Disease has taken over the city. With the spread of "Delta Fever" , New Orleans is no longer divided by racial differences.Now the only this that matters is blood type. Everyone is literally fighting to stay alive inside the wall.

Sherri Smith is a compelling author that keeps the reader on the edge of their seat by adding unexpected plot twists. I have read other books by Smith and this one does not disappoint. Orleans takes a new approach to the dystopian and reveals a scary, yet realistic, plot twist about what goes on beyond the walls of Orleans. Using Delta Fever as the reason for society's massive shift, it takes a turn away from the typical story lines in the genre today.

The narrator, Fen, is young girl full of fortitude and spunk. Her story of survival is horrifying; yet through it all she remains strong and ready to fight for her life. Fen narrates in dialect, similar to other books such as Blood Red Road and After the Snow, and takes some getting use to. But the dialect adds an extra sense of reality to the book. Just like in real life, people from different areas of the USA speak different- have their own slang or ways of saying things. With Fen, it is the same. She grew up in the Delta, walled in from other parts of the United States. There is a reason for Fen's unusual way of speaking.

Smith takes time to immerse the reader in the setting of the story without dragging the plot to a haunt. This is a rare quality in some dystopian and fantasy novels. She paces the description in such a way that the reader understands what is going on but is still intrigued in what makes this particular society works. Smith is a magician as bits as pieces of this horribly fascinating world unfolds before the readers eyes.

Orleans is a mature read . Although it is geared for ages 12+ it is better suited for older teens. The book has a powerful story and in some parts gets brutally honest when dealing with violence. The redeeming quality about the violent nature of these parts is that those details definitely have purpose in the story and are not just placed to entertain the reader. It helps address the bigger questions about human nature and what we, as a people, are capable of in hard times.

Orleans is captivating and a must read for anyone who loves the dystopian genre. It will keep you turning pages for hours. This is a must read.

What I Loved:
Given the onslaught of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, knowing which authors have simply hopped the trend bandwagon heading to Fametown and which just had a story to tell that happened to fall into the genre can be incredibly difficult. They've all got, more or less, visually arresting covers and a whole lot of marketing to convince you that this one will be the real deal. Well, my friends, Sherri L. Smith has most definitely not written this book in a bid to earn more readers by writing for a popular genre. Where the most popular of this sub-genre these days focus more on romance, Orleans pays attention to world building above all else.

Obviously, I really, really love dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, otherwise I wouldn't read as much of it as I do. However, I go into this endeavor well-aware of the weaknesses of such novels. More often than not, the world building receives minor attention, taking a backseat to either mindless action or star-crossed romance. Sometimes, the author does not even offer the slightest hint of how the world evolved into its current state.

In Orleans, Smith starts the reader off with explanations, a detailing of how the Gulf coast went down the shitter, and got quarantined from the United States after a series of devastating hurricanes that resulted in an even more disastrous disease. The individuals still living in Orleans, having dropped the new as they're nothing new and shiny about this place anymore, live a very different life than the one we know. The bulk of the population lives in tribes, organized by blood type, as the disease affects the different blood types in varying strengths. Those with AB blood are most affected, but, as a result, they are most to be feared, since they will attack the other types to take their blood, which helps stave off the illness. From the very beginning, Smith starts building her world and she does not stop until the end, and, y'all, her world is creepy.

On top of the completely stellar world building, Orleans earns so much respect from me for being diverse. People of every race run around Orleans and, for the most part, skin color and heritage do not matter any more; now blood type does. The heroine, Fen de la Guerre, is dark-skinned, but, honestly, I'm not completely sure what her race is; what I do know is that she's non-white, and so are most of the people running around this book. Also, the cover matches this book perfectly, down to the way her hair's piled on top of her head.

Fen really does make a marvelous heroine, in that she looks out for herself and does whatever she needs to do to survive. In a lot of survival situations in novels, the heroine's always trying to save everyone and sacrifice herself, but that rarely strikes me as a realistic. Fen has one person she really cared about and would have died to protect, but that person dies in childbirth in the beginning, asking Fen to take care of her child. Even with this promise in place, Fen considers abandoning the baby at a couple of points to save herself. Later, when she meets a wandering scientist, Daniel, she only helps him to help herself. Her character arc does change a bit, but mostly she's a hardened warrior who has been through the worst and does not want to go back.

What Left Me Wanting More:
The downside for me was that I never felt any connection to the characters. While interesting, Fen closes herself off to everyone, including the reader. Despite her sections being told in first person, I really just didn't have a handle on who she was besides a survivor, which, while, utterly believable on the one hand, kept me from engaging completely. Though his sections were in third person, Daniel was still more approachable, but he's so useless in Orleans that I didn't feel much for him either. Also, I'm generally not a fan of multiple points of view when they're not all in either first or third person. The switches between first and third person narration, in general and here specifically, catch me off guard, especially once Daniel and Fen are in the same place.

The Final Verdict:
Other factors worth noting are the writing style and the romance. For the former, be warned that Orleans is written with quite a bit of dialect, as Fen speaks and thinks that way. Her dialect, however is quite mild, mostly consisting of the use of 'be' in place of 'are.' Though I'm really not a fan of dialect, this did not bother me. To the latter point, there is no romance. None. If you like post-apocalyptics for romance, you'll want to be passing by this one. As for the rest of us, Orleans serves as a lovely break from the monotony of instalove.

Readers who have mostly given up on post-apocalytpics because you're sick of all of the sappy romances and pathetic attempts at world building, Orleans will restore just a little bit of your faith in the genre.