Genre
sci-fi, apocalyptic, dystopia
Setting and Context
USA at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, post-apocalyptic USA around 90 years later
Narrator and Point of View
Narrator: omniscient
Point of view: third person
Tone and Mood
Nightmarish, adventurous
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: a young girl called Amy who becomes one of the victims of the NOAH project, but shows different outcome-not losing her humanity; Antagonist: the twelve original virais, Babcock
Major Conflict
A research project under the name of NOAH brings subjects for testing a bio-weapon, which ends up eradicating most of the humanity. The subjects become vampire-like creatures who kill and infect people. Amy is one of the subjects who showed a different outcome to the testing, she didn't lose her humanity but became immortal. Ninety years after the outburst, she ends up in a colony where she will find help for the plan of saving the humanity.
Climax
Amy reunites with Lacey and with her help the group kills Babcock and all the virals that came from him; Amy destroys the capsules containing the virus mixed with her blood, capsules that rescued Alicia and made her become an immortal like her. Peter, Alicia, and Amy set out back to the colony.
Foreshadowing
"Neither of them noticed the man-the off-duty Oklahoma state trooper who, two hours before, had seen the wire report on a girl kidnapped by two Caucasian males at the Memphis Zoo, before clocking out and heading off to the high school to meet his wife and watch his kids ride the bumper cars -following them with his eyes."
-Wolgast and Doyle leaving the amusement park with Amy just before they are about to get caught and decide to surrender.
Understatement
"The other Jeanette, the one who stood on the highway in her stretchy top and skirt, who cocked her hip and smiled and said, What you want baby? There something I can help you with tonight?-that Jeanette was a made-up person, like a woman in a story she wasn't sure she wanted to know the end of."
-Amy's mother's coping mechanism with her situation, trying to survive together with her daughter
Allusions
"He hated the look of the place, beginning with the trees, which were scrawny and pathetic, their limbs all gnarled up like something out of Dr. Seuss, and the flat, windblown, nothingness of it."
-Wolgast upon arriving to Texas
Imagery
Visual imagery of destruction and waste, the setting of a post-apocalyptic world, is present throughout.
Paradox
"A blast of quiet that felt like noise; she stood a moment in the hushed corridor."
Parallelism
"They're sad. They're so many. They've forgotten who they were. Who were they Amy? And she said: Everyone. They're everyone."
Metonymy and Synecdoche
The littles-referring to the children at the colony under the age of eight
Personification
"...the hands that Peter had watched for hours in the infirmary, going about their careful work-lay motionless at her sides."
