Review: Excellent Read!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 16, 2011
Post apocalypse is not my cup of tea, I generally find the genre too depressing, or too weird, or some combination of both. I think that may have been why I was reluctant to read this book after being so pleasantly surprised with Ms. Callea's first book, Haircut. I also have to admit that I was a bit worried about wasting time on an indie author and a 99 cent book.  Good economic value is not a strong incentive for me to buy a book. I have a ton of books that I have not read. If I want to make good economic sense, I can read one the zillions of books I have laying about. Those are free at this point.  So I approached this book with some hesitation.  Yes, Haircut was good.  But Haircut was small potatoes compared to post apocalypse...a much bigger stage.Somewhere along in the first few chapters, I realized that Ms. Callea is a real writer. So I found my "this is a 99 cent indie" chauvinism did not apply.  Perhaps because of the first person narrative, I sensed a certain autobiographical feel to the book.  I Googled the author. She occupies the first 10 pages and, yes, she is a real writer, a former newspaper reporter.  And, yes, there are some parallels to the protagonist in the story.As I said post apocalypse is not my cup of tea, yet Callea's story is believable.  She doesn't describe nuclear winter with bands of horrific mutants firing away at each other with crossbows and laser weapons from homemade armored pickup trucks. She presents a much more realistic world...what happens when you have a Katrina, then a season of Katrinas, then the big one in California, some tornadoes, and some terrorist activities all hit relatively short order. So the US is not destroyed, it is severely crippled.  Hard to believe? No. Not at all.  Consider the events in Japan last March.  First you have an earthquake, then a tsunami, then a nuclear disaster.  Hard to believe?  Well it happened.  Why did it happen?  Well when you build not one but 6 nukes in a earthquake zone and on the coast, well, bad things can happen.  So Callea considers what would happen if indeed when it rained it poured, and I felt that she delivered a very believable scenario.To me the purpose of fiction is to allow yourself to experience something that is out of your normal realm--and suffer no harm, but perhaps learn a lesson.  This is what it would be like if.... Callea's use of the first person narrative was extremely effective in demonstrating a world gone awry from the perspective of a typical young woman...not a superhero, but from a real flesh and blood woman who is bright but not a genius, who is moral but not a saint.  Mia is a very believable ordinary woman who very much believes in the power of love but has severe doubts about God.  Callea handles the intimate scenes in an intelligent balanced manner.  This is not a bodice ripper, yet there is a realistic element of sexuality in the book without getting sleazy.  One of the things I liked about this book was that Mia would deliver something of a mini-essay every now and again on a wide variety of subjects. The one at the end of the book on love when she is taking care of her mother-in-law, touched my heart. There was a certain down to earth philosophy of the common person that I enjoyed in this book.  All in all, I felt the book was excellent.  Callea has done a great job on this book and I look forward to reading her future works.