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The Grid
Boy meets girl. They fall in love. Sweet. But the girl is a Chinese spy and the boy a terrorist bent on destroying America by taking out the electrical grid. Imagine there's no no food, no water, no heat. Medical devices fail. Communications devices die. Looting and chaos break out. Would you die in a week? A month? Two months? Now imagine there's no electricity for nearly 2 years. No phone, no money, no A/C or heat, right? Sure, but you also lose life-sustaining medical devices, water (towers can't refill without it), food (no money to exchange for it and no energy to grow it) causing a total breakdown of government, social services, and the military (how do you communicate without electricity?). Massive chaos, looting, death. That's the future facing all of us if Jacob, John Boyd, and the rest of the FBI Counter-Terrorism Task Force can't stop them in time. But, who's behind the plot? And, how can you stop someone if you don't know who's behind the plot?
313 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 21, 2018
7 people want to read
About the author
Angela Hausman
11 books20 followers
I started writing in middle school - fantasy. People seemed to like it. Over the last few decades, I've written a tremendous amount, but mostly nonfiction. After MANY false starts, I finally finished my first book, Buried Ladies, a few months ago. I'd love to hear what you think about it. Maybe this writing thing will pan out.
My day job, for now, is working as a marketing consultant. I'm hoping my marketing will help when I ultimately publish my book. In the meantime, you'll see my blog covers writing topics, book marketing, as well as sharing my writing.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 25, 2019
This is a great story that could possibly happen to the US. It made me think about what would happen if we lost our power over the entire US. The author does a great job of making a very believable story with these events. The characters and plot is great!
May 15, 2019
I was given a free electronic copy of this book by the author, in accordance with the terms of For Love of a Book's Advance Reader Opportunity Program.
No kidding, it took me a month to finish barely 88k words.
I saw this in ARO's list and was like GIMMMME. I'm an energy engineer and absolutely wanted to read a book about the grid being taken down. When people complain about how technology makes everything horrible, I'm there thinking "Surely you like your food preserved, and hot water, and your car, and not dying at 40 from a common cold".
For the premise alone receives a star. It is a very high stakes situation by itself. Then, I also liked how it slowly unravelled, showing different sides of the conflict.
Unfortunately, this was waaaaaaaaaaaaay overdone. There are 16 narrators (the ones that appear more than once marked with double dash):
Of these, only Cheng and Jacob were necessary to tell the story. Although, maybe I'm wrong, because I still can't tell the difference between Jacob, Boyd and Dillon. Joyce and Jennifer are just slightly easier to differentiate because they are women. Making different narrators from characters that usually share page time and characteristics is a very bad idea.
There were too many narrators, and they weren't very compelling either. Both good and bad guys were quite slow at times, and at others leaped to conclusions with too much ease. The chaos was not helped by the fact that each chapter happened in a different location and time frame, and those were not ordered sometimes, which led to holes and reader confusion.
Going back to the stakes, the consequences of a grid outage were well explored and layed out, but then they were repeated to exhaustion. Different narrators told the same speech over and over again. Repetition was not limited to these infodumps, though. Words were repeated several times in the same paragraph, and different paragraphs and scenes showed the same things. Also, there were some very weird and forced phrases spread in and a handful of typos.
Finally, I have to say that it was disappointing in what should have been the most original part of the book: the engineering proper. First, the book kept referencing "electrical plants", but it was never clear whether these were substations, power plants, industries... And then the conspiracy. Maybe it's because the grid in the US is an absolute shit,
To provide a reference, I work designing photovoltaic plants for the Spanish grid. There are around 5.500 high voltage substation positions, with well over 60 substations in the city of Madrid alone, and plenty of redundant lines. It is an incredibly stable system, and we are a relatively isolated territory, with connections only to Portugal and a couple of lines to Morocco and France. A wide territory like the US should be much more interconnected and safer. Also, transformers not only have software protection, but big ass fuses that break and immediately disconnect in case of overload. But hey, maybe it actually is an absolute shit. On the other hand, we have a grid manager that is partially State-owned, which saves us from the whims of the big electrical companies. Seems like a good idea, huh?
Thanks for reading!
No kidding, it took me a month to finish barely 88k words.
I saw this in ARO's list and was like GIMMMME. I'm an energy engineer and absolutely wanted to read a book about the grid being taken down. When people complain about how technology makes everything horrible, I'm there thinking "Surely you like your food preserved, and hot water, and your car, and not dying at 40 from a common cold".
For the premise alone receives a star. It is a very high stakes situation by itself. Then, I also liked how it slowly unravelled, showing different sides of the conflict.
Unfortunately, this was waaaaaaaaaaaaay overdone. There are 16 narrators (the ones that appear more than once marked with double dash):
Of these, only Cheng and Jacob were necessary to tell the story. Although, maybe I'm wrong, because I still can't tell the difference between Jacob, Boyd and Dillon. Joyce and Jennifer are just slightly easier to differentiate because they are women. Making different narrators from characters that usually share page time and characteristics is a very bad idea.
There were too many narrators, and they weren't very compelling either. Both good and bad guys were quite slow at times, and at others leaped to conclusions with too much ease. The chaos was not helped by the fact that each chapter happened in a different location and time frame, and those were not ordered sometimes, which led to holes and reader confusion.
Going back to the stakes, the consequences of a grid outage were well explored and layed out, but then they were repeated to exhaustion. Different narrators told the same speech over and over again. Repetition was not limited to these infodumps, though. Words were repeated several times in the same paragraph, and different paragraphs and scenes showed the same things. Also, there were some very weird and forced phrases spread in and a handful of typos.
Finally, I have to say that it was disappointing in what should have been the most original part of the book: the engineering proper. First, the book kept referencing "electrical plants", but it was never clear whether these were substations, power plants, industries... And then the conspiracy. Maybe it's because the grid in the US is an absolute shit,
To provide a reference, I work designing photovoltaic plants for the Spanish grid. There are around 5.500 high voltage substation positions, with well over 60 substations in the city of Madrid alone, and plenty of redundant lines. It is an incredibly stable system, and we are a relatively isolated territory, with connections only to Portugal and a couple of lines to Morocco and France. A wide territory like the US should be much more interconnected and safer. Also, transformers not only have software protection, but big ass fuses that break and immediately disconnect in case of overload. But hey, maybe it actually is an absolute shit. On the other hand, we have a grid manager that is partially State-owned, which saves us from the whims of the big electrical companies. Seems like a good idea, huh?
Thanks for reading!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews