Official Review: A Different Alchemy by Chris Dietzel

Lovely_Ink · Post by **Lovely_Ink** » 09 Jun 2014, 08:08

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "A Different Alchemy" by Chris Dietzel.]

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Have you ever stopped to think about what would happen at the end of the world? Will we all just cease to exist, will women stop reproducing and society continue until the oldest person died, or will some natural disaster come and consume all of humanity until nothing man-made still stands. In “A Different Alchemy”, we get one writer’s perspective on the end of days. It is a sad and compelling look at the world through the eyes of one man.

Jeffrey is a middle aged man who is the husband to Katherine, son of aging parents, and father of Galen. Having survived the past 30 or so years of the Great De-Evolution, Jeffrey has a keen memory of the way things used to be and can’t help but to look back on how the world used to be as he faces his mortality and the dire state of the world that he now lives in. As a resident of Philadelphia, PA, Jeffrey has just experienced one of the greatest tragedies of their present day. Thousands of people have been killed as a result of a genetic mutation which has come to claim the reproductive capability of society. Among the victims is Jeffrey’s son Galen. Faced with the reality that he will never again be able to see or interact with the one person that he loved the most, Jeffrey abandons his familiar life in a search for something, anything, that will soothe the hurt and anger that feels.

As the remaining Philadelphians plan to travel South and join others who are migrating to escape the inevitability of their deaths, Jeffrey chooses to forge his own path and travel North, away from everyone and everything that he is familiar with. Along the way, Jeffrey reflects on the twenty years that he was able to spend with his son and how that precious time influenced the way that he sees the world. He looks back over the early years of his life and marriage and wonders what would have happened if the Great De-Evolution had never taken place. As he thinks about his life with his wife and son he wonders what life would have been like if Galen had never been born or if he and his wife had chosen to have children at the very beginning of their marriage instead of waiting until after the genetically altered humans had started being born.

This entire story is a series of reflections and new experiences that make me think about what I would do if I had to live in Jeffrey’s shoes. It is hard to imagine a land where the luxuries and great man-made structures of my present life are abandoned and left to decay. Would I be able to cope in peace with the new world or would I stubbornly cling to the life I once knew until my demise was imminent. At the end of the novel I am left at peace with Jeffrey’s choices and how he was able to find peace in a time of unrest. At the end, instead of chasing what he once knew, he was able to find a way to live with the life that he now has.

When I first read the description for this book I thought I would be taken on a fantastical journey to the end of the world. I was quite surprised though to get a humanistic tale of a man at a cross roads. Jeffrey’s story is both hopeless and fearless. His interactions with the people that he meets along the way highlight the thin line that we walk between civility and savagery in our quest to hold to the standards of humanity that we've always known. “A Different Alchemy” was a thoughtfully, well-written book and I rate it 4 out of 4 stars.

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