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minervas-sandwich · 3 years

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This is a post about the worst book I have ever read

Z FOR ZACHARIAH by Robert C. O’Brien

Rating: 0/10 stars, it was required reading when I was in like 7th grade and every single person in our year hated it and everyone in the year ahead of us was like “Oh, you guys finished that? Yeah, it’s garbage.”

Plot: There’s a nuclear war that kills everyone with the exception of a teenaged girl named Ann Burden. Through a flashback we learn that she is alone because after the war, her family all left to go see if anyone else survived and they never came back. She’s been living alone on their farm for a year, somehow managing to not go crazy. She is still alive because- well, here, look at this lovely map I drew based on the author’s descriptions of where she lives

(There are other abandoned houses but don’t worry about those right now.) As you can clearly see, Ann lives in a valley surrounded by hills- not mountains, hills. And the radiation of the outside world cannot get into the valley because it can’t get over the hills. Because that’s how radiation works. However, you can also see that there are two rivers. River 1 is blue because it originates from an underground spring within the valley, so it is within the uncontaminated zone and safe to drink from. River 2 is brown because it originates from the outside world and flows into the valley, so it is poisoned. And the radiation can’t get into the valley through the cutout in the hills where this river is because reasons.

So while River 2 may be poisonous and killed all the fish that were living in it, it does not harm any of the grass and plants around it on its banks. Just don’t touch it and you’re good. And even though rivers 1 and 2 meet up at some point, the water downstream of this junction is still safe, so don’t worry about it. Just don’t touch the river that comes in from the outside or go over the hills and the big bad radiation from the nuclear war that killed the rest of the entire planet can’t hurt you, Ann!

Anyway, Ann is just doing her thing, giving the reader the exposition and explaining what her day-to-day is like and giving us all of her hopes, dreams, aspirations and fears and this takes up a good portion of the book.

One day, like a year after her whole family disappeared and everyone else in the world supposedly died, a mysterious man shows up in a weird suit. He just walks right in from the outside, which is obviously freaky considering everyone is supposed to be dead, so Ann, having only survived because of hills and farming skills, not anything cool like being a really kick-ass swordsman, decides to hide in a cave to make the guy think the valley is abandoned and see what he does. And what he does is immediately take a bath in the poisoned river, River 2. He obviously becomes incredibly sick from the radiation poisoning, and Ann, both out of pity for his suffering and fear of spending her entire life alone in this dumb valley, decides to take care of him. She spends days nursing him back to health with your basic cold care routine: chicken noodle soup, keep a cold washcloth on the forehead to combat fever, get plenty of rest, all the stuff that will definitely cure your radiation poisoning as it destroys your bone marrow.

So of course the mysterious man gets better over time, but at first he is incredibly delirious and he reveals information to Ann by accident, through things like drowsily answering questions, talking in his sleep, and having flashbacks. Through this Ann figures out that his name is John Loomis, he was a scientist in some big city and he and his team were working on creating a radiation-proof suit for the military when the bomb hit. He and his coworker were the only ones working overtime in their weird underground bunker, so they both lived, but there wasn’t enough food and they only had one finished suit. The other man put it on and tried to leave, but John shot him three times in the chest, killing him and taking the suit for himself, a fact which Ann confirms by then going to look at his weird suit and finding a patch on the chest. Ann begins fantasizing about marrying him and raising a family, which is partially understandable, because she’s been alone for a year and probably gone a little crazy and also the Florence Nightingale Effect is a very real thing, but also WHAT girl you’re 14 and he’s 30 and you just found out he killed a dude to save his own ass! Why?!

When John returns to his full mental and physical health, Ann decides not to reveal that she knows he killed a dude, and he clearly doesn’t remember telling her because his first order of business is to forbid her from touching the suit, presumably to keep her from finding the patch. Second order of business is to take over her own farm and start giving her orders even though she’s lived here perfectly well for a year and already has a whole system in place. He also takes over all of the resources they have. He does some good things, like figure out how to get gas out of the pumps at the gas station that had been previously unusable because they were powered by non-existent electricity, but then he does weird shit like use the gas to power the tractor because they need to quadruple the amount of harvest they have even though it’s just the two of them. He also does some weird things like require her to read to him and play piano after dinner. It’s creepy and gross. He claims they need to act like they’re in a new world and starting a colony, which makes Ann uneasy, and then within a few days he tries to rape her in the middle of the night.

So Ann runs away immediately and goes to live in her cave again, stealing the supplies that she needs at night while John is sleeping. Later, she approaches him and proposes sharing the valley and, more importantly, the farm, but continuing to live apart. He act surprised that she won’t live with him any more, y’know, like an asshole trying to gaslight someone. Ann is smart enough not to waste time trying to justify her decision to him and sets hard limits on not telling him where she is living now, and John repliers that he has no choice but to accept because the farm is too big to run on his own, but he hopes she will reconsider and “act more like an adult and less like a schoolgirl,” y’know, like an asshole who wants to rape 14-year-olds. Ann doesn’t like the situation, but she’s worried about making it through winter on her own, so she has to work with him to ensure she has access to the harvest.

John locks the door to the storage barn, and when Ann asks him for a key, he shoots her in the ankle with the intent to make her lame and slow so he can capture her, a fact she is well aware of. John uses her dog- oh WAIT! Let me talk about the dog!

Okay so the dog went with her family a year ago when they went to look for other survivors because the dog loved the parents more than her so it ran after them. The first time Ann lived in the cave, just when John had shown up, she accidentally found the dog living in the woods with most of its hair missing because it had skin burns from the radiation but otherwise it was 100% fine. Because that makes sense. And it also makes sense for a dog to return home and decide to live in the woods for god-knows-how-long instead of return to it’s owner and also this entire time it’s managed to not leave any noticeable trace of itself that Ann would have seen.

So John uses the dog to track Ann and discovers her cave and burns all of her supplies, but Ann herself escapes and lives in the woods. Her gunshot wound gets infected, but she gets better. While it’s infected, though, she has a weird dream of a different valley full of little kids waiting for her to teach them how to read. She decides that this was a vision of the future and there is another valley out there somewhere with people in it, and she needs to steal the suit and escape to there. Because trying to wear the suit and leave worked out so well for the other guy. Also fever dreams that you have after going through the trauma of loosing your whole family, being left in solitude for an entire year, almost being raped, and then being shot and hunted are always facts you should accept without hesitation.

Also she decides to make the hard decision and kill her dog so John can’t use it against her, but the dog dies after swimming across the poisoned River 2, because radiation poisoning was so damaging to it’s health the first time, of course it just straight-up died on round two.

Ann tricks John into meeting her outside by leaving a note, and then when he leaves the house she sneaks in and steals the suit. Instead of hauling ass out of there, she confronts him. She tells him she knows he killed the other guy, and the fact that she knows this shocks John enough that he doesn’t shoot her. Yup. That makes sense for his character. He then begs her not to leave him alone here, because he’s also been wandering alone for a year and he’s just lonely. Ann promises to send people his way if she meets any, and then turns to leave. John calls after her that he once thought he saw birds heading west, so maybe there’s something living out west, and Ann heads in that direction. In other words, John gets the most half-assed redemption arc I’ve ever seen and I’m including Supernatural in this.

The End.

“But Minerva,” I hear you ask, “Who’s Zachariah? Why is the book named after him?” Well, my good readers, let me tell you. Zachariah is a misspelling of the name Zechariah, who wrote the Book of Zechariah in the Bible. For Ann, though, it’s a reference to the Bible Alphabet book she had as a child that went from “A is for Adam” to “Z is for Zachariah.” As a small child, Ann believed that since Adam was the first in the book and also the first man that God created (making him the first person on earth), she thought that Zachariah was the last person on earth since he was at the end of the book.

That’s right. The title of the book comes from the main character’s weird childhood memory that is only a vague bit of symbolism of her misunderstanding who the last person in the world is and which is so ridiculous that the book literally lays it out for you almost exactly the way I did and is so insignificant to the story as a whole that it’s not even included in the movie adaptation.

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen and good friends: the worst book I have ever read in my entire goddamn life.

#tw rape ment #tw animal death #z for zachariah #cant wait to get hate from the zfz fans lmao

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