Bleak and unrelenting is right -- I don't know that this post-apocalyptic book is the best choice to read in the middle of winter, while often flying on planes or lying awake in the night with this story to think about. The sentences lacking verbs also bothered me. Yet when I put the book down, I kept thinking about the two characters and how their story could possibly end. How can the plot be the same series of events over and over in the same setting and still provide suspense? But this book does. The language is evocative, doing for the color grey what The White Darkness does for white. I have a renewed appreciation for color, warmth, and food. Not sure how I feel about the ending. 
 Favorite quotes: 
 "He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known that better than he." 
 "The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes." 
 (and all the rest of the haunting description on p. 181)