Shannon Turlington

This is a series of reviews of my favorite books published between 2010 and 2019.

The Three by Sarah Lotz (2015)

Four planes crash simultaneously in different parts of the world, three children survive and behave strangely afterward, and conspiracy theories run rampant, including a cult of Christians who believe this signals the End Times.

This book had quite an interesting structure: a nonfiction book-within-a-book made up of interviews, newspaper articles, chat logs, and the like that gradually unfolds the aftermath of Black Thursday, as it quickly came to be called. This story is rife with ambiguity: Is there really something off about the surviving children, or are folks just going nuts and trying to make sense of a senseless coincidence? I am comfortable with the ambiguity, although I think the end of the book does offer a pretty clear resolution, if you read between the lines. This for me was a very readable thriller, and different enough from the norm to keep my attention.