Signal Boost

Cole (Radio Silence) embeds a meet-cute between gawky, good-natured, and truly adorable gay 20-somethings into the poorly constructed postapocalyptic world of her Off the Grid series. A solar flare has taken out electrical and communications grids worldwide. Jang-wan “John” Seong is hiding out at his parents’ upstate New York home with his brother, Gabriel; their sister, Maggie; Gabriel’s girlfriend, Arden; and the mother and infant they’ve taken in. After he catches tall, blond astrophysics grad student Mykhail Shevchenko in their tomato patch, the family offers the stranger wary hospitality, and when he heads to Burnell University to find a professor who may know more about the solar flare, John joins him, motivated by a potent combination of attraction to Mykhail and a desire to fix the world. Resource-hoarding bullies, power-hungry scientists, and racist, abusive soldiers make for flat, uninteresting antagonists, and though the series will probably continue to explore the setting’s mysteries, the fact that this volume ends as soon as the romantic outcome is assured feels disappointingly abrupt. (May)