Pleasantly surprised by this book. It tells the story of a seemingly lone survivor of an alien invasion of Earth. We follow Emily as she wakes up in this new, eerily quiet world and tries to wrap her head around what has happened. Throughout her new reality, strange things are moving, gathering and forming. And at first, they are seemingly oblivious to Emily's presence. Emily wisely realizes she needs to get out of town...quickly. We ride along with her as she packs and prepares for her journey out of NYC to her destination of a far away, friendly (but is it?) voice on the phone somewhere in the cold, frigid North above her. Along the way she uses (the author uses) her journalistic background to (sometimes painstakingly) describe all of the weird, new things she discovers on her way. And these things are indeed weird and also a bit gross and increasingly dangerous. I can't count the number of times I wanted to yell at Emily to take a frigging photo! Surely that phone of hers had a camera on it, surely she could pick up a disposable camera so that she can document this stuff for future scientific purposes. But I suppose this is just my love of photography and science talking. And I suppose that is the point, Emily's background is journalism and we are lucky that it is. Although some of Emily's reactions to things seemed a little wrong to me and I often found myself thinking as I was reading, that's not what I would do, on balance this was a well thought, well written story and it didn't really matter. I found myself looking forward to seeing what Emily would do or discover next and to anxiously see how she got out of the current dilemma. I was just happy to be along for the (bike) ride. Although I normally shy away from series books, it looks like this is the wave of the future, at least in scifi. There were a lot of unanswered questions in this first book and I look forward to finding the answers to those questions and reading about the future adventures of Emily (and Thor!). 
 as an aside: the author Paul is a GR AW Group member and I smiled when I saw that this first book is even graciously dedicated in part to AW's fantastic moderator, Gertie.