Salvation Day by Kali Wallace

 

This seemed like an interesting premise, from reading the cover copy, and the novel mostly delivered; I guess there's at least one very loaded word in the cover copy that gives a lot more away than Ms. Wallace probably would have preferred, but it's not as though she can really claim the novel is particularly subtle on that point (or at all subtle on that point, really). It becomes obvious really early on that the two POV characters are both coming from very sheltered backgrounds and are going to have to come to grips that things in the setting are not as either of them has been led to believe. That process adds a neat sheen of bildungsroman. On some level, I'm not sure I believe all the SF-ish tech, I don't know how important that is, SF often has wildly implausible tech (and sometimes wildly implausible "science") in it, it mostly comes down to how the song is sung--and the song here is song pretty well.