A Gift Upon the Shore by M. K. Wren
A Gift Upon the Shore is a post-Apocalypse book. I didn’t like the style of narration which flips between the present (maybe 40 years after the nuclear war) and the days immediately up to and beyond the nuclear war. The present is told in the first-person, present tense and the past is told in the third-person, past tense, even though it’s the same narrator. This is disconcerting.
I suppose the main problem is that nothing much happens in the present. We’re all the time looking back on when things did happen and when you tell a whole book looking back at some events, they’d better be pretty big when you get to them. And they weren’t. The past story fizzles; the present story ends with an unlikely confrontation. Neither is sufficiently engaging although there might have been something there if it had been presented differently.
The basic premise is that religion is going to spoil any chance of recovering civilization. So it’s also depressing. It may be true, but that’s someone else’s worry.