I was on board with this version of the world - no one above the age of 13 is alive, all the adults have died as a result of radiation from a dead star explosion - until we got to the giant Supernova War on Antarctica which went on and on and on ... it was treated as a kind of game, Olympic games to be precise, but there was no concern at all for the death toll it would take to say, shoot missiles at each other or crash tanks into each other.

The other issue I had is that the children's world, while modeled after the adult world, had none of the same motivations. So for example, the adults trained the children to do adult jobs, because they would need to keep the country running once the adults were all dead. And they do for a little while, but then they're just like, we don't want to work, we want to play. And so they just stopped working and played. Except ... that was not universally true. The leaders continued to try to manage the country, and there were one-off comments about reporters and newspapers being published and whatnot, and it's like ... but the primary motivator of capitalism is money - getting the paycheck. If that's not the motivator for children, then a) why are THESE children continuing to work, and b) WHY are these children continuing to work? I would have loved a longer explanation of the world rather than endless talk of various weapons and supply lines to Antarctica, just so they could all kill each other and then freeze to death while trying to escape Antarctica when "summer" ended.

I also wanted to know what was hinted at when the entire populations of the U.S. and China swapped continents, and they talked about how things turned out but didn't specify what those were. But apparently some of the people ended up on Mars in the epilogue, so I guess that's one outcome, but it's not clear why.

So. It was interesting in parts, but I wanted more of some things and less of others. It was slow going but the writing was good.