'Metro 2033' by Dmitry Glukhovsky
'Metro 2033' by Dmitry Glukhovsky

The good

  • Fascinating setting: humanity surviving in the Moscow metro after nuclear war.
  • A nice tour of different “flavors” of humanity at each metro stop: communists in one stop, fascists at another, religious nuts, scholars, warriors, merchants, and so on.
  • The tour through each metro stop makes it an exciting read that’s sometimes tough to put down.
  • A dark, somber, gritty reflection on surviving a nuclear war. Surviving in the darkness of tunnels, subsisting on mushrooms and pigs, losing the ability to safely go to the surface, and so on.

The not so good

  • The writing, or perhaps the translation to English, is not great.
  • The characters and dialog feel a bit stiff.
  • A bit too much “magic” for my tastes; radiation can cause some mutations, but this book takes it to an extreme, and I found it took me out of the gritty nature of the book and into something that sometimes felt cartoony.

Rating: 4 stars