Orleans by Sherri L. Smith
Released: March 7, 2013 | Genre: Young Adult, Post Apocalyptic
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First came the storms.
Then came the Fever.
And the Wall.After a string of devastating hurricanes and a severe outbreak of Delta Fever, the Gulf Coast has been quarantined. Years later, residents of the Outer States are under the assumption that life in the Delta is all but extinct… but in reality, a new primitive society has been born.
Fen de la Guerre is living with the O-Positive blood tribe in the Delta when they are ambushed. Left with her tribe leader’s newborn, Fen is determined to get the baby to a better life over the wall before her blood becomes tainted. Fen meets Daniel, a scientist from the Outer States who has snuck into the Delta illegally. Brought together by chance, kept together by danger, Fen and Daniel navigate the wasteland of Orleans. In the end, they are each other’s last hope for survival.
Sherri L. Smith delivers an expertly crafted story about a fierce heroine whose powerful voice and firm determination will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.
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Sherri L. Smith originally planned the world of Orleans so meticulously that she created a notebook with separate sections for religion, weather, food, tribes, and disease. She was inspired by the appendices in Frank Herbert’s Dune, which detailed the ecology of its fictional planet. Eventually, though, Smith got bored with cataloging her imaginary world and decided to get on with writing the actual novel.
REVIEW
⭐ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Borderline unreadable. 🗣️😵
Orleans is a frustrating experience from the very beginning. I didn’t want to hate it for the dialogue, but here we are. The exaggerated southern dialect is so cartoonishly over the top it makes the book borderline unreadable. Instead of immersing you, it feels like a parody that forces you to waste brainpower deciphering broken English, and by the time you figure out what’s being said, you’ve lost any sense of the actual story.
The setting could have been intriguing, but instead it’s flimsy at best and laughable at worst. The biological science doesn’t hold up, the geography feels implausible, and the social structure of the Orleans wasteland is nonsense. It’s like the author threw together some grimy buzzwords and called it a setting, without caring if any of it was remotely believable.
Even the central plague, the Delta Fever, is never explained. And honestly, that might be the one thing working in the book’s favor. The total lack of description spares it from even more criticism. With all the emphasis on blood types and transfusions, you have to assume it’s a bloodborne pathogen. Because if it were airborne, the already wobbly world-building would completely collapse under its own weight.
To make matters worse, though, is that none of this pays off. Even though the book is relatively short, you could literally just read the back cover and then skip straight to the last 10% and you’d have the entire story. Everything in between is filler, rambling, and badly written dialogue.
Orleans is a novel that promises a gripping dystopian adventure but instead delivers a tedious, confusing, and ultimately unsatisfying read. If you’re looking for a dystopian novel with depth, coherence, or even just legible prose: look elsewhere.
