After listening to this audiobook I went back to the book blurb to see if perhaps I had misunderstood what I was purchasing. After all, I thought that I was getting a book much like The Martian only this time the astronaut who is in trouble is in earth’s orbit. Sure enough, that’s what seven out of eight lines of the blurb is about. Why then was it only about twenty percent of the story? Out of the one hundred twenty-seven words that form the blurb, there are six pesky little words that tell you what the real story is about: “And the family he left behind”. Honestly, I find this a little misleading because this should have been titled “The SpaceMan’s Family.” It isn’t that the story of what’s happening to the astronaut’s family on earth when the lights go out doesn’t make for a potentially good story, but it isn’t what I thought I was buying.
And it is only “potentially” good. Perhaps I am naïve, but I hope that when a solar storm knocks out all the computers on the planet (which the vast majority of people don’t know has happened—they just know the lights are out) I hope it takes more than six or eight hours for the world to start down the road toward a Mad Max-style apocalypse. But honestly, the lights go out late enough at night that many people are already asleep, but a weird cult has already mobilized shortly after dawn the next day, and within another hour instant street gangs are forming and people are trying to steal from each other, and a couple of hours later cops are getting in on the stealing. I mean, it could happen that way, but honestly, the whole story happens in less than 24 hours and I just found the break down of society a bit rushed.
To complete my frustration, the novel ended on a cliffhanger. Now I recognize that in a series there are often unresolved events, but really, there is no pretense at even coming to a resolution point on two of the three storylines.
That being said, I did like the cast of characters, and that’s important. I just think that the blurb would have been much more honest if it had focused on the astronaut’s family struggling to survive and reunite during an apocalyptic crisis while the astronaut tried to find a way back to earth.