Come Lucky April

Plague 99 #2

by Jean Ure

Come Lucky April is set a hundred years on from Plague 99. Harry's great-granddaughter is a girl called April, who lives in an all-female run vegan society, which is carefully governed to eliminate risk of plague-like situations. Men have shamed themselves and are no longer in power. There's a primitive aspect to life as though the 21st century as we know it never happened.
At 12, boys are exiled for 5 years ...'they went away as barbarians and came back civilised', which means castrated. 'Homecoming' is when they are welcomed back - but how welcome are they?
We meet Daniel, a survivor of a patrician clan, whose quest it is to find unclaimed parts of the 'outside world'. His great grandmother was Fran and his great grand-father was Shahid from the first part of the trilogy. He wants to find the diary that Fran left behind in her family home in Croydon.
In the abandoned house, girls and boy meet ... Daniel and April don't, at first, realise they are connected by their distant ancestors' friendship. A potential romantic attachment forms between them. His presence creates conflict, but they take him into their community, where the conflicts worsen.
Daniel questions everything April has been brought up to believe. He challenges the women's views and their rejection of the orthodoxy he knows. He makes David, a long-term friend of April, question what he has lost as a man.
An exciting novel, rich in texture and passionate in its ideas.

Genres: Dystopia, Young Adult, Science Fiction, Post Apocalyptic

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Prolific English children and young adult author.

Had her first book published while still in high school, then studied theater at Webber-Douglas in London. Her most well-known work is the Point Crime novel Dance with Death. Others include Plague 99, After the Plague (previously "Come Lucky April"), Big Tom, Family Fan Club and Shrinking Violet, as well as the fantasy The Wizard In the Woods.

Today, Ure is very popular with British female teenage readers with novels such as Shrinking Violet, Family Fan Club and Passion Flower.

Ure has also translated Danish writer Sven Hassel's WWII novels to English.

Reviews

[Lee Osborne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This sequel to Plague 99 is set in a community partially founded by Harriet, one of the characters from the first book, and it takes place a hundred years later.

The rather interesting premise is that the community is female-dominated, both in terms of numbers - there are very few men - and in terms of leadership. In the early post-plague days, male aggression was deemed responsible for the world's ills, and so selective breeding is used to create a much larger number of female children, and young males are castrated in their teens.

It's a drastic solution that could either be seen as sensible or horrifying, depending on your view of things. Whilst at least in theory it's a peaceful and free community, the arrival of a non-castrated male from another community causes problems and shows up a rather sinister side to things.

It's a fascinating premise, although as in the first book, I think it's been a bit clumsily handled. It seems to be typical of the rather earnest middle-class left-wing thought of the late eighties and early nineties, but it does have some strengths, and it's very thought-provoking. I think there's several themes here.

First, if you were presented with a blank sheet of paper and given the opportunity to start society again, more or less from scratch, what would you do? What power structures would you establish? How would you eliminate problems and conflict?

Second, actions carried out with the best of intentions can have very serious unintended consequences.

Third, if you live your life in a bubble, without exposure to other ideas, you can become extremely smug about how right you are, and sneer at anyone who disagrees with you. Even in an age where communication is easier than ever, people are extremely ignorant and suspicious of people who are different, and it's very easy to create a "them and us" attitude.

Fourth, collective guilt is an extremely unjust and unfair concept, and collective punishment is an extremely cruel thing to inflict on people.

There's a lot about this book that could be better, but it's extremely relevant to the society we live in at the moment, where it feels like a lot of power has been abused. It does seem that a lot of patriarchal power structures might be on the verge of collapse. If that happens, we should be very careful about what we replace them with.

[Weaponisedfunk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been thinking about this book a lot over the past few weeks, the current state of the world as it is and whatnot. Given that my first exposure to Come Lucky April was as a twelve year old boy, my memory might be a bit skewed, and a more critical re-read may be in order.

Nevertheless, this book left enough of an impression to haunt my thoughts almost fifteen years later, and that’s noteworthy in of itself.

[Alex L · Rating 4 out of 5]

More then just a standard follow up to the apocalyptic original. Set 100 years in the future and following the descendants of the original book. The book explores the topics of government system, the relativism of civilization 'progress' and sexual dominance. I think one of the more interesting aspects is that a civilisation having only a horde of newspaper reports from the 1980s and limited books comes to the conclusion that all men do is rape and attack women. Consequently, they decide men need to be 'trained' to stop their worst urges resulting in the women essentially being guilty of the same acts they were trying to stop.

[Jed Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I decided to read this book because it had an interesting plot and storyline, that set it in the future aver a worldwide plague has killed most of the previous civiliseation.

This book went under the category a book written before I was born.

I liked the plot and storyline of this book because it is unique in the way Jean Ure has created this seemingly alternate world after the plauge, hence the title, where survivors try to bring back their own civilization with others.

I didn't like how some of the features in this book were not believable and it did not tell you about the plauge only the aftermath of it.

I would recommend this book to people similar to my age and no younger because some parts are hard to understand and imagine that Jean Ure has written.

[Adele · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'd forgotten i'd read this book. Just as well, Because i from what i remember, i was quite disappointed. i did not enjoy this book as much as the first book.