Daniel

Amazing performance.

Revisado: 03-09-20

An engaging fantasy tale, full of enlightening reveals, backstory, and twists. Samuel Roukin’s performance, though, really brings it home. He gives the characters such life and such vivid personality that I can’t wait to hear more of his narration.

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Reads like a freshman's first attempt at a novel.

Revisado: 08-28-16

The First Rule of Prose is, "Show, don't tell." Forstchen takes this rule, puts it in a blender, and reduces it to an unrecognizable goo, before pouring it into the toilet and flushing.

The narrator explains the characters' mental states. Characters explain their own personalities. Instead of saying that a character shifted his weight from foot to foot, eyes darting to the corners of the room, the narrator tells us, "He felt anxious." Instead of a character doing something that demonstrates that she's tough, but fair, she'll say, "You know, I might be tough, but I'm also fair." It's painful.

On top of that, we have to contend with unending (and flatly stated) comparisons of life post-War to "something out of Medieval times" and "something from the books he had read about the Middle Ages" and on and on. If those parallels were subtly drawn, it might have worked very well, allowing the reader a moment to realize, "Ah, I see: when our tools and our technology are reduced to what they were long ago, we start ACTING the way we did long ago, too!" This moment amounts to more reading pleasure than Forstchen is willing to give us, however, so he spells it out, and does so over and over and over again. It makes for extremely annoying writing.

Combine that with relentless hammering on the ideological premise that people are animals and, the second the shit hits the fan, we need to protect "our own" at the expense of everyone else, and I start wanting to hit my head against the desk repeatedly.

An EMP attack and its aftermath make a really cool premise, and could serve as a powerful investigation of human nature as well as a salient cautionary tale about preparedness, if only it had been better addressed by a skilled writer.

I hesitate to say that this is the worst book I've ever read. I can't, however, think of a worse one, off the top of my head. Its ham-fisted moralizing, bland characters, insipid language, and pedestrian narration make it seem like a first draft that accidentally got sent straight to the presses, skipping over editing and revision. According to the summary, Congressmen and Pentagon officials have called this "a book all Americans should read." I guess we should be thankful that those people are in Congress and the Pentagon instead of our English classrooms.

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