Review: Orphan Flu
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 2, 2013
(I received a free copy of this book to review. I do not believe my review is in any way influenced by having received this book for free.)I am an avid reader in the apocalypse and post-apocalypse genres so I was very excited to read this novel. The premise is very simple: a disease kills off all of the adults, leaving children to rule the world. It is very similar in theme to the TV show Jeremiah that came out about ten years ago.The novel starts with the protagonist, Sara, and her father going to the local mall to get some small parts from a Radio Shack. This scene starts normally, but when Sara asks to visit the other stores, her dad says that the risk of disease is too high, so they have to return home. This scene makes no sense to me - the part is not labeled as being absolutely necessary, and if there is an plague of apocalyptical significance going on - why would you risk going to a Radio Shack? It has just as much chance of contact with the disease there as any other location. Her father is revealed in later scenes to be very intelligent and very determined to keep his family safe. He built a bunker, they have a generator to keep them off grid, they have enough food to last a very long time, Sara and her older brother are taught how to shoot and hunt from an early age... yet he takes them to mingle with people. Throughout the book, Sara hears his voice repeating survival tips. So I am left even more puzzled why the book would begin in a Radio Shack. It was an unnecessary risk and was stupid enough that I pretty much lost all respect for the father.Considering the name of the book and the nature of the plague, it should come as no surprise when Sara is left an orphan. This is when most of the action really begins. After staying in their house for months, occasionally heading into town for supplies, Sara and her siblings agree to take a cross-country trip. Along the way they have a series of action and gore filled events. They meet some new friends where it's pretty much a given that she will discover a budding love interest, only to leave them and decide to see what's going on in Washington, D.C.Honestly, this is where a lot of things begin to turn me off, in addition to the zinger from the first chapter. For having watched her parents die, Sara is remarkably cool with it. All of the kids are. No one is in a huge state of denial or mourning. Instead of being upset that they are orphans, it is said that there are ten year olds driving Porsches! Sara herself only occasionally remembers to miss her parents. The timing is a little fuzzy. At one point it's said that it has been a year since her parents died, but there has been so little happening during the two points. I am really interested to know how the characters are surviving - what difficulties they have in finding food (there are none; food is seemingly always within reach), how they are dealing with other necessities like clothing, dealing with the weather, boredom (beyond a couple of mentions of missing the internet), etc. There is a good amount of rambling and chance encounters that really seem to serve no purpose and are much less interesting than other scenes could have been.The characters are pretty flat. I liked the brother's personality; his may have been the most developed in the book, although his was a little borderline cliche/typical. I would have liked more personality and more character development. And if your parents have just been killed by a disease that leaves almost every other adult in the book also dead - shouldn't it affect the characters just a little bit? Not just in the main characters, but in the supporting characters, too. If I were a teen or pre-teen, I do not think my first thought would be, "My parents are dead! Oh, well, at least I can drive this cool Porsche."