I'm 20% into this one and teetering on the verge of giving up. Post-apocalyptic is probably my favourite genre, but I don't, as a rule, choose instruction manuals to read for fun. There's some attempt to write this book as a story, but it's pretty clear that the author's main agenda is to describe (in great detail) what you need to prep for an emergency. Mount Rainier erupts. The family is hit by the mega earthquake that follows and then cut off by liquefaction (mud), and then suffer through ash fall. Within the first few minutes of the quake they are all bugged out from the house via their emergency ladders, with their emergency de-bunking kit bags and sheltering in their barn which has generators, heat, cooking facilities, water-filtration, food, gas to last them and their neighbours for as long as it takes. It's all quite instructive. (My bag of rice, saved in the garage, looks pretty pathetic to be honest.)
But I think I've made all that seem more exciting than it actually is in the story. When you're focusing on the tensile strength of your ladder and not the actual events causing you to climb down it, something is wrong from a narrative pov.
There is a huge amount of fun, however, to be had imagining women reading this, and I'm looking forward to seeing some of their reviews. Mr Drummond runs a tight ship. Woman and kids know their place. But I guess he's the only one who knows how to work the generators, the stoves, the radios, the water-purification systems (he built and installed it all), so he's top of the competence hierarchy. Sorry ladies.
I'll persevere with this because there is a good story in this book, it's just not the one currently being told. I mean, even the shooting of four looters wasn't exciting! How can you get that wrong?
I'll update when finished or given up.
Well, huh, I did finish this book and was quite glad I stuck with it. Poor old Drummond family, not only did they suffer an earthquake and volcanic ash, they were then hit with the US currency crashing, war with China, Mexico invading the south, illegal immigrants turning on the American people to support the invasion, the US government falling, the federal system collapsing and State rule returning, and then the author threw in a Chinese bio-weapon pandemic to round off the story. But it was all told in such a dry way, basically Rick Drummond listening in on his shortwave radio to news reports, that it was all quite logical and realistic. But even whilst all this was happening (somewhere else and to other people), the Drummond family were discussing planting seeds or cleaning boots from the ash mud, or eating something, or keeping warm, or... well, all the things you actually would fill the day with while the world around you collapsed. So in some ways this was an incredibly realistic book, it was just a bit... boring. A bit weird for an apocalyptic novel. More text book than fiction, more political polemic than fun.
I genuinely think this book would trigger some readers too much to cope with. This is extremely Christian, patriarchal, anti-Government, pro-gun. There's no doubt the author (speaking through Rick Drummond) thinks post earthquake, volcano, mud, nuclear war, invasion, federal collapse, pandemic America is better off than pre all those disasters.
There's no doubt this author knows his prepping stuff but he's not really an author. I wish he'd partnered up with a better writer, as massively edited and rewritten this could have been absolutely brilliant. As it was, I winced at lines such as "I put the water on to boil. The water was fresh that day. Water was something else I'd have to think about for the future. The water started to simmer." Okay, I admit I made that up, but it was a pretty good impression of reading this at time: constant repetition of words and pedantic descriptions of every menial task.
So, in summary, read if you enjoy being triggered, or read if you need to check your prepping is up to scratch. I don't think I'll be reading the (3) sequels.