This review is part of Melody’s Summer Reading: Diversity Spotlight. Enjoy!

The Last Day by Ellen Oh
Seen in Diverse Energies Edited by Tobias S. Buckell & Joe Monti
Release Date: October 1, 2012
Publisher: Tu Books
Genre: Young Adult Dystopian, Short Story
ISBN: 978-1600608872
Source: Bought Diverse Energies
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In a world gone wrong, heroes and villains are not always easy to distinguish and every individual has the ability to contribute something powerful.

In this stunning collection of original and rediscovered stories of tragedy and hope, the stars are a diverse group of students, street kids, good girls, kidnappers, and child laborers pitted against their environments, their governments, differing cultures, and sometimes one another as they seek answers in their dystopian worlds. Take a journey through time from a nuclear nightmare of the past to society’s far future beyond Earth with these eleven stories by masters of speculative fiction. Includes stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, Ursula K. Le Guin, Malinda Lo, Cindy Pon, Daniel H. Wilson, and more.

The Last Day by Ellen Oh is the first short story seen in Diverse Energies, a collection of diverse science fiction, dystopian, and fantasy short stories written by diverse authors. This year, particularly this summer, I’ve really started to fall in love with short stories, so I was very excited to start this collection and enjoyed the first story so much, I couldn’t wait until I read the whole thing to talk about it. Stay tuned for my review of my overall thoughts on Diverse Energies. Today though? It’s all about The Last Day.

In The Last Day, we fall Kenji and his best friend, Akira in a futuristic Japan in which the Eastern world and the Western world are at war and Kenji’s hometown has just been bombed. Can I just give an overall WOW and bask in just how fantastic everything was in this short story?

Right away, I connected with Kenji as we see his home life and his struggles and follow his family’s harrowing tale of the fight for survival. For peace. It’s not much later that we meet his best friend and what a smile this dynamic brought to my face. Seeing the wonderful relationship between these two best friends, it just reaffirms how much I love friendship stories and how much I miss them in the forefront in any tale. Needless to say, this was such a treat.

In all of this, we see the terrible reality brought upon a neighborhood during war, the nightmare it is being bombed on your homeland, and the disturbing and oh so bizarre and twisted allegiances people have when they place their trust in other people’s hands they don’t know and will never meet. This is a story about love and loyalty and survival and sacrifice and it’s beautiful. And I can’t forget how visually stunning this story is. It really came alive in my head so clearly, I felt I was in this world right beside Kenji and Akira. If all of this is any indication of what I have to look forward to for the rest of the short story collection this was published in…if this sets the tone for what’s ahead, something tells me this is going to be my favorite short story collection period.