Name: The Returned
ISBN: 9780778315339

Jason Mott

When their son Jacob, who died tragically at his eighth birthday party in 1966, arrives on their doorstep, still eight years old, Harold and Lucille Hargrave must navigate a strange new reality as chaos erupts around the world as people's loved ones are returned from beyond.

The Returned

Jessica Nottingham

So, the concept of The Returned is really interesting. It's actually the reason I chose to read this book in the first place. Imagine if the dead came back. Not as zombies, but as living, breathing people. Just the same as the way they were when they died. As the dead come back, what happens to the lives of the people who lost them? That's what The Returned tackles, just not quite the way I expected.
 
What I was really hoping for here was a look at the way society can break apart in the face of something so big, and slowly start to deal with it. What I was given, was something a lot more flat than that. Despite everything, I never really felt connected to any of these characters. I think that if I had more knowledge of who the Returned were, why they came back, what their purpose was, I might have been more invested. Instead, everything was so vague. People come back, society tries to deal with them, they go away. End of story.
 
I'm not sure what I was supposed to take away from this book. It was a quick enough read, but not something that every really grasped me. I think this was at one point a tv show? Or going to be a tv show? Maybe that would be a better medium, with more time to build things from the ground up. As for this book, I wasn't convinced.