Monday, June 25, 2012

A Review As Promised

Here at Outpost Rebel it's 101 at 2pm in the afternoon. I got Cherry's directives acomplished for the day while it was just in the high 80's and low 90's. Sitting here savoring some homemade vanilla ice cream and spied a book I said I would do a review of. I knocked this book out in three hours or so.


This book tells the story of the travails of an extended family after the effects of a massive solar storm. The author tells the tale over a couple of months and adds a 2 years later trailer of three and a half pages. There are several story's within a story and the whole thing is told in two hundred and fourteen pages.
It's interesting to see how the patriarch develops his end of the world strategy (which we find out piece by piece) and the way his family views him and his obsession. Good character development as well as a good story line. How ever, the authors firearms knowledge is suspect as he tells of a character "levering" the bolt of a bolt action rifle. Tackett says in his prelude the book is a mix of fiction and survival instruction manual. Well, for a survival manual it is pretty slim on information. He does tell of the things the characters did to suvive but there are very few actual details. There could be more filler to flesh out the novel. A nephew of the patriarch is a special forces soldier who is cut loose from the service. He and a few of his military buddies hike for a couple hundred miles with a group of medical women they saved. They had to slow down for the medical personel and take more breaks and that is about all the detail of this trip. They left base, they saved the medical personel, they arrived at uncles place. Cut and dried.
Another thing I didn't like was if one character decided that an action would happen then it would happen to the others in the story very soon. A couple of guys were making their first area patrol and found wild hogs in the area. The saw a huge boar and figured a boar of that size that has been eating human bodies for a few days would soon take to hunting live humans. Lo and behold that night a huge boar breaks into the crawl space hideout they were living in.
In closing all I can say is it is a good story lacking in details. The best part of book? My son bought it for me. If you want to read it wait for a free or cheap download to become available.

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