The writing isn’t terrible, but the story is far fetched and incredibly skewed towards a young adult audience. I dig the strong female lead, “Ripley” is a great literary throwback to Alien.
** Spoilers ahead **
One big problem is the time wasted on petty, predictable teenage drama. There’s no adult situations, it’s all nicely safe for prime time viewing. The cool girl with the powerful mother she hates smokes cigarettes. Her secret service protector loves her like a daughter. The amount of time wasted with the authority figure in the dorm room is tedious. The racist and stupid campus cop who thinks a computer is a bomb? I don’t know what other reviews are talking about with this being a “believable” EOTWAWKI book. It feels amateurish and undeveloped. All the characters are clichés.
The character development can really only be described as awkward. The neighbor man whose wife is a racist, so he can’t talk to Grams? The foreign friend who happens to have killed a bunch of people and is an expert with knives and guns—so says a mysterious secret service agent? I just can’t get past these parts.
I really did want to like it, but it felt like chewing a rubbery piece of meat.