Will I love Contagion?

Pre-Covid, I loved to read about dangerous viruses taking over the world. The genre has lost a liiiiitle bit of its charm since then, but Contagion is too good a story to pass up. It reminds me powerfully of the Dead Space video games, with its mysteriously uninhabited space stations. Like the very best scary sci-fi, it blurs the line between the terrifying things close to home – like an unexplained illness – and the deep, dark, scary depths of space we have yet to understand!

Contagion is my oh-so-scary recommendation for teens with a taste for mystery—it’s also the pandemic book on the list that is most escapist, in its way, being set in outer space. It’s impossible not to root for Bowman’s characters, and it’s fascinating to see pandemic literature travel off-planet.