I was voluntarily provided this review copy audiobook at no charge by the author, publisher and/or narrator.
I like this story. You can feel the panic of the family, of James trying to safely get his family home. They run into all sorts of creeps and killers on the way and some really nice people too. When the water surge is racing towards them, you wonder if they’re going to get home. Even after they survive the initial panic, the rest of the trip isn’t very safe either. Things go wrong left and right and even though they struggle, they’re strong enough that you’re sure they’re going to make it. And when they finally do get home, they don’t get to relax because there’s danger in their own house. You wonder just how bad things are that this poor family can’t even get back home without running into the worst people.
And that’s where I have a problem with this story. How do things go so bad so fast? We’ve seen people and communities come together when a hurricane hits and yes, the power goes out too but I can’t believe humanity sinks so low so fast. How can people be out there, killing others for their supplies within days of the outage happening? How can there be squatters taking over people’s houses within a day or two? It just doesn’t make sense. I can understand if there’s some looting or some fights but some of the stuff that happens? It just doesn’t seem very realistic. If it really happened like that, we’d see it after tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards but we don’t. People tend to come together, at least at first, and I would’ve liked to have seen that more than having people being killed for nothing or their meager supplies before anyone can even understand what happened.
Mr. Pierce did a good job with the narration and I liked how he gave some characters personality. It would’ve been nice if there had been a bit of a difference in voices but I don’t mind it too much either.
As a post-apocalyptic story, this isn’t too bad if you really like those kinds of stories, give this one a try. Even though it could’ve been stronger, it’s still interesting.