So, I have mixed feelings about the series. Schow writes well & you fet to know many characters which he generally manages well but it was obviously a lot (& at times, too much) to juggle. The narrator does a good job, but his accents suck & all sound too similar. Something that drove me crazy was how fast every gun ran out of ammunition & their total & complete inability to find more. I get it that the 2 main locations for the series were in “non-permissive environments” (Chicago & Southern California), but there are more than 24 TRILLION rounds of ammunition in private civilian hands in this country! And somehow, they manage to get their hands on FRAGMENTATION GRENADES BUT NOT AMMO??? That simply makes zero sense. Sorry, but this is a post-apocalyptic pet peeve of mine. The fact is, there will be ammo for GENERATIONS in the apocalypse. Back to the story, though… I really liked the premise, but I honestly feel like they missed out on creating something monumental with the main antagonist. She could have been amazing, but she was mainly just a hot mess. The survivors, well, I just feel like they made a lot of dumb choices throughout the storyline & should, honestly, have died many times over. One thing I did appreciate was the author’s representation of just how depraved humans are capable of becoming when the thin veneer of society is tore away. He did not shy away from these descriptions, to his credit.
Review from The Complete Age of Embers Series (Books 1-5) →