This series has been a bit up and down for me, First book was great, second felt a little less so, the third was a wild ride, and the fourth struggled a bit at the start but found its step in the end. This one, I think is the first one I would say I just didn’t enjoy much at all.

Let me start by saying this has nothing to do with Phil Thron. Phil is an absolute gem among narrators and really understands how best to convey emotion and inflection into the characters.

Where this book really suffers is in the characters themselves. The Librarian is not the main focus of the book, which is fine, a new direction doesn’t hurt, but we’re presented with a new character named Eve who honestly comes across as a very bland Marry Sue replacement for Erica. Her perspective brings nothing of interest to the story and is too similar to that of the Librarian in that she does what is right and is a fighter. These are more or less her only character traits. The rest of the characters, with a couple exceptions, are very uninteresting and seem more like they’re there to facilitate moving the plot. The worst character issue by far though, is the talking dog. I’ve loved the slightly tongue in cheek nature of the apocalyptic mutants in the series, so a talking dog could have worked, but instead we get something that should never be in any work of fiction: a Scrappy Doo type character. The talking dog is unimportant, has no plot relevance. The talking dog has no witty or funny dialogue. The talking dog tries to serve as comic relief and only serves to cut tension when it needs to build or ruin an emotion driven scene. The dog could have been omitted from the entire book and it would have been an improved product for it.

The biggest story issue of the book is that it meanders without purpose for the vast majority of the first act. The Librarian talks to people on the river and people discuss that it is nice that the world is getting back to normal, repeated ad nauseam. This is aggravating most because what is missing most from this post apocalyptic book, is the apocalypse. Very little is effected, to the point where the genre barely applies and could have been changed with minor tweaking. It is reasonable to say things would get better, but this much and you lose the charm and interesting nature of a post apocalypse. The author gets it in gear towards the third act and sets up for what could be something interesting down the line, but I fear the damage has already been done. I don’t think I will be purchasing the next book in the series, and I can’t recommend anyone else does either, which is a shame given the promising start of this series. I think the author has tried to change too much too fast and won’t let enough of a status quo to build to really make the changes matter.