As noted by other reviewers, the over-arching premise of this series is quite interesting – same characters, different scenarios. We’re warned in the preliminary Author’s Note that the actions and fates of the characters may be different from book to book. That’s a neat idea and I can’t recall reading a series quite like this before. It will be interesting to see what the entire series looks like. The narration by Kevin Pierce is very good as well.
Unlike most of the other reviews, I didn’t give this story a full five-star rating. Paradoxically, even though I’m keenly interested in the idea for this series, I couldn’t quite get my mind wrapped around the fact that they’re connected-but-unrelated. I think my brain subconsciously identified connections and continuity across the stories, such as: same characters; same location; a character randomly finding invitations to a bunker in one book and characters who owned the original invitations in the other book; and, the fact that Ash is specifically called Book 1 while Lit is specifically called Book 2, implying a sequence in which the reader should read the series. On the other hand, the contexts and fates of the characters were different in each story (a character may die in one story but not in another, for example). My brain is kind of spinning gears, trying to work out how to resolve this dissonance – continuity on some levels but disconnections on other levels. I think this mental conundrum subconsciously distracted me from my pure enjoyment of the story. I’m glad to hear that most other reviewers didn’t seem to mentally hiccup the way that I did!
“I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.”