Please, Let Me Save You scared me at first. Well, it's scary. It's terrifying and I hope it never comes true in any way shape or form. But as scared as I was by everything that happens in the book, I was compelled to know what happened to the characters. It's hard to say there's a "main character" to the story. It's sort of like Game of Thrones in that it follows many different characters to get a whole-world view of what's going over the course of about a day. Sometimes this was frustrating because I wanted more of the characters that I had already fallen in love with. But, invariably, these characters also caught my interest and they were so different from one another, looking back I really appreciate how that increased the way I could appreciate the story. Looking back on it, I guess it doesn't make sense for a story about the end of the world to focus on one character, because it's ending for everyone. This book captured that really well. It's really fresh. I can't immediately think of another book exactly like it, but if you do, please comment because I would love to read more this. Hopefully the next book comes out sooner rather than later. Definitely reccomend.

I received a copy from netgalley to give an honest review.

The story is a miss-mash of point of views with the crux revolving around a ground hog day scenario, except instead of falling asleep, it's constantly dying in a nuclear apocalypse. Now the general premise of this book is actually great. We have a strange event, with some great descriptive visuals, and the point of view of Brandon is an absolute blast to get the book rolling.

However, after Brandon I found myself really disliking a lot of the PoV characters, it wasn't their dialogue or how they are as characters, but Mr Healy created some characters that are put in very heated, social commentary situations and makes them act in kind of outrageous manners. And their antagonists are generally mustache twirling evil villains, rather characters in their own right, with motivations other than, racism or homophobia.

If it wasn't for these characterizations I think I would love the book, it has a great hook, the premise is great, the descriptions in several areas early on are an absolute joy, it has a large cast that are work well for their parts of the story. But for me, characters are very important and some of these things are just too problematic for me to immerse myself. This could just be a pet peeve for me, so I would still recommend this to people solely for the premise and the more unique experience of getting to see more PoVs during ground hog day.

A time-loop story centered around October 31st, 2020, when atom bombs explode in America. I don’t want to recap more of the plot as the summary already reveals quite a lot and so I just want to share my opinion on this piece:
As an action (& gore) heavy time-loop story it is great. It follows a bunch of people through this day as they attempt to survive. While covid is mentioned (face masks come up a few times in the beginning), this quickly fades into the background as current survival becomes more and more important. Brandon is the only one who remembers what happened after each time loop resets and as hinted at in the summary he goes quite far in his quest for survival. He wasn’t my favorite character (that spots reserved for Yolanda and Denise), but I was always excited when his story came up as I knew he would be the only one that would find a way to fix their problems. I also liked that he found a way to be incredibly resourceful in order to ensure their survival.
I also really enjoy the ending of the novel and while it felt a bit slow during the middle, the story picked up again towards the end and became quite interesting. I also enjoy messed up apocalypse stories, so I was fine with the intense amounts of violence portrayed here, but I wish we had been given a little bit more information on how and why the white supremacist Christian groups knew as much as they did and how they managed to mobilize that fast. I would not advise this book to anybody who does not want to read about (threats of and off-page instances of) sexual violence, (on-page) graphic deaths and lots and lots of violence targeting minorities.
However, I have two main issues with this story as well: The first is the massive amounts of transphobia and slurs reproduced on the page towards Yolanda. While I love that from the main characters everybody treats her well, her role in the story is very minimal and so having to read not only about how she’s harassed at the pharmacy, but also her childhood trauma including the t-slur, was a bit much. If she had played a more important role in the story herself, I might have understood this as a character-building moment, but the way it was done instead just felt rather exploitative. However, I appreciate that the author reached out to me after my review where I addressed a lingustic issue that is often used to other trans women (by writing trans woman as one single word, which does imply they are not just a different type of women, but a different thing alltogether) and that this will be fixed in the released version. The second issue I had was that I didn’t think the chapter following the conversative Christian biker gang, who are using the chaos to purify the world, was necessary. I think it gave too much away that could have been shared through the other characters discovering it themselves and made me a lot less interested in the story. A personal annoyance moment was also mentioning Harry Potter in a story that features trans people in 2024. Not A Vibe tbh.
All in all, it is still an interesting story with a fascinating premise and intriguing characters, particularly interesting for its great diversity of characters (including a black trans woman, a black family and a child with Down Syndrome, although I would have liked her to have a bit more of a plot in the story). Since those are characters often forgotten in other apocalyptical stories, I liked that they were portrayed here. If you are looking for a new and interesting take on time loops and apocalypse stories and have a strong stomach, you might enjoy this story!

Trigger warnings include: car accident, cheating, coercion to stay pregnant, deadnaming, death, domestic abuse, injury, gore, gun violence, mention of harry potter, homophobia, homophobic slurs, misgendering, racism (mainly anti-black and anti-asian racism, but also instances of slurs against other minority groups), racist language & racist slurs, sexual violence, suicide, transmisogny, transphobic slurs, violence

I couldn’t put this book down and finished it in 4 days, and I’m a slow reader.

I was immediately intrigued by Brandon’s story, getting caught in a time loop. It was like “Groundhog Day” but with the tension ramped up and the stakes being life or death.

Each story line takes you on a new adventure that still feels interconnected. They’re traveling from different places in California, and then they converge and have to work as a group.

I don’t want to give the story away. Once you start reading you’ll get sucked into the story fast enough and won’t be able to put it down. I really mean that—I was staying up way past my bedtime reading this. Highly recommend.