Purchased from BetterWorldBooks.com
Former Palo Alto City Library book

Description:
It’s the anxious eve of the millennium. The car is packed to capacity, and as midnight approaches, a family flees the city in a fit of panic and paranoid, conflicting emotions.
The ensuing journey spans decades and offers a sharp-eyed perspective on a hardscrabble future, as a boy jettisons his family and all other ties in order to survive as a journeyman in an uncertain landscape. By turns led by love, larceny, and a new sexual order, he must avoid capture and imprisonment, starvation, pandemic, and some particularly bad weather.

In Things We Didn’t See Coming, Steven Amsterdam links together nine luminous narratives through the mind of one peripatetic and resourceful wanderer who always has one eye on the exit door and the other on a future that shifts more drastically and more often than anyone would like to imagine.

Told in vignettes over the course of three decades of the MC's life, Things We Didn't See Coming is the tale of a slow apocalypse. This is not the flash-bang where the world changes in the blink of the eye. Instead, it is the slow deterioration of our society brought on by spaced-out events. And it all started with Y2K. We know now that did not happen and even the author of this book knows it didn't happen as the book was first published in 2009. Anyway, that is the beginning which sparks a divide between urban and rural people (sound familiar?) where barricades are thrown up around the cities and the rural communities are the 'haves' in terms of food. Then over the next several years climate change ravages the world, a pandemic flows through the population, governments topple only to be replaced by another and then another. All the things we feel we are experiencing or right on the brink of right now, at this very moment of the 2020 election, climate change burning the west coast of the US and melting glaciers, a global pandemic, it feels like an all too real possibility as we numbly go about our business and lives hoping that the light is right around the corner and 2020 can be tossed into the dumpster fire that started in 2016 and we can begin to rebuild. Come back to us RBG! The blue skies lie!

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One of the starting books for The Bookbox of the Apocalypse!

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Eeny meeny miney Mo… Finally decided to try this one~