NonprofitAtty

Great Audiobook Experience

Revisado: 03-13-25

This is a great story collection if you like horror in the flavor of magic realism.

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Mediocre

Revisado: 11-14-24

Another mediocre sci-fi novel from a man who cannot write women. Minor spoilers ahead.

Pretty blonde astronaut stuck with the protagonist, naked, in space, within the first few chapters? Eyeroll. At least the voice actress for the female lead gave her best with the material given.

And a protagonist that is supposed to be a genius but can’t find his way around any situation without a convenient plot contrivance? The author should have stuck with writing a type of ordinary man stuck in extraordinary circumstances, maybe that would have been more relatable and not so cringe. The narrator for the male protagonist really did not help here, it was giving community college professor who really thinks they belong at Harvard.

I’ve listened to worse but you can definitely do better than this one. Definitely don’t waste a credit.

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Not that great

Revisado: 06-01-23

You could do worse. The narrator was very good but the story and characters were pretty flat and one dimensional. I was mostly bothered by the awful cliches and casual racism in this book. The St Louis “gangsters” wearing gold chains and pants that showed their underwear? Really??? It was gross. Also, apparently the government is bad but cops are good somehow and save everyone, or at least they save the good chaste Christian white teens and a token black person that can sacrifice himself to save a few more white people. The Christian-centered religious stuff in this book was unnecessary and a cheap way to do character development. I know most of these tropes are a problem of this genre but writing libertarian , evangelical, and/or rightwing cliches into your story often weakens it. I will not be continuing with the series.

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Great, Glad to See More Awareness of Gerontocracy

Revisado: 04-13-23

I thought this was great. I was expecting a fast easy listen and I got exactly what I wanted. In a lot of apocalyptic fiction I have to ride through shallow unrealistic libertarian fantasies, nice to see the tables turned for once.

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Wonderful

Revisado: 04-05-23

This book is such a great perspective on chronic illness. Should be mandatory reading for all healthcare providers.

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Sad I Wasted A Credit on This

Revisado: 06-16-22

I just wanted some basic sci fi, but this was terrible. It really dragged for the first half. Filled with disposable characters. Plagued by a myopic white-male centered worldview that is frankly embarrassing for an author getting published in the last decade.

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OK for an easy apocalypse read

Revisado: 04-29-22

This was just OK. The story and characters were a little flat and the storytelling a bit simple and convenient. The narrator didn’t put emotion into it - it sounded like he was reading a product manual. There was one character that made me feel like the author might need to do some personal work on racial stereotypes and jock/nerd resentment. The main character is a white guy that is supposed to come off (I think) as smart, heroic, and humble, but it didn’t come off that way for me. Reminded me very much of the Jack character in Lost, who the writers were clearly much more enamored with than I was.

You can also tell a man wrote this book and there are the usual issues with that (female characters a little one dimensional, many instances of inadvertent misogyny alongside clear intentional misogyny to of course let you know who the bad guys are, not the greatest writing on motherhood/childbirth, etc). It is hard to get away from these issues in many genres but it definitely brings down the quality of the story and certainly there are some male authors that avoid these issues better than others. This book is more on the typical male author side.

The book wasn’t terrible if you are looking for a quick and easy read this genre, though I wouldn’t recommend it to Black readers.

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Centered on White Christian Man American Archetype

Revisado: 02-13-22

Warning, some minor spoilers ahead.

This story was OK, the writing was decent and woven together well, but it was very distracting to have the whole story be centered on white Christian patriarchal colonists attitudes without any awareness of it. Government is bad, unless you build it from scratch for yourself and less than 100 of your white neighbors (and a token stereotyped minority). Of course, no one else can start a good government from scratch, so beware that all your neighbors are going to be bad people without moral complexity. Even as they use the same white patriarchal framework as your group and would identify as Christian too, they are just really bad at it, I guess. You can plunder post-apocalyptic resources at will, don’t worry because the author is going to make it seem you can do so without ever facing real moral dilemma and what you want or need will always just be there for the taking. But the “others” that plunder, especially if they try to do so from you, those are the baddies without any moral grey area.

The author’s clear need to do some personal work on what it means to live in a world that centers and was built on white Christian patriarchy, and how that would actually work out to try to replicate that framework in the post-apocalypse, were just too distracting to really enjoy this one. It plays as fantasy that somehow the problems created by such a society magically disappear if you just shrink society down and get the right group of simple people. People who won’t get in the way of the main character, except in minor laughable ways when the plot needs tension. Problems are illustrated in other groups but are played off as caused natural post-apocalyptic human nature, never as the result of the same motivations, prejudices and archetypes also driving the in-group.

It is a shame because the main character and the quality of the storytelling could really create a nice story if the author had a more nuanced, complex, and self-aware worldview.

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