Review: Great? No. Very good? Definitely!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 16, 2014
For the price you get a lot: Three full length novels that would stand alone by themselves but with enough tied in between them to insert an occasional extra view point for one character for an event described elsewhere for another character. Seeing familiar people pop up in another part of the story is interesting and, IMO, not overdone.  Nothing's perfect, however, so here is my own assessment.Character development was quite good overall; the author put a lot into getting the reader involved with the characters, with the occasional plot twist and setback to keep them from getting too one-dimensional.  The descriptions of how most of the human race was wiped out by an artificial plague and how the remaining survived were quite stark and detailed.  As an example, in the first book the characters survived by scrounging and looting but, by the third novel set five years later, they were farming, hunting, growing their own crops, and a thriving trade/barter system was developing.  The characters in each book had their own ways of dealing with the new ways of doing things and I enjoyed how their individual reactions changed as the stories progressed.  In other words, they changed with stress, which is how a real person would act.There were some reviews citing poor editing, but I didn't note major gaffes.  I have seen much worse in a disappointingly high number of Kindle books I've downloaded.  The few I saw here were so rare that they were easy to ignore and simply read through.There are three things I would like to see improved in any (possible?) revisions.Firstly, just how often is it necessary to drop the "F-bomb" to create a good story? Answer: Rarely if ever.  It happens far too much and distracts the reader.  Maybe it's "cute" or "fun" for thirteen year olds (of any age) but adults have grown out of that.  The author needs to grow out of it, too.  Throwing it in with dialog tells us something about the character.  Throwing it in unnecessarily in the narrative tells us something about the writer, and it's not complementary of him at all.Secondly, there is too much unneeded description of people, places, and things.  The stories (all three) could be shortened by at least ten percent simply by condensation.  Giving us three or four sentences describing a character's thoughts is usually enough, but three paragraphs is more than we need and interferes with the flow of events.Thirdly, the settings are mostly in the west coast states.  I'm not saying this is a problem, but what happens in the Southeast, Midwest, and elsewhere?  Give us, Birmingham, Columbus, and Wichita!There are two more books in the series that I plan to download soon.  I'm curious to see how some of the characters in the first three books tie up some loose ends.  I think there is also a "prequel," and I'm also curious to see what it looks like.Overall, not bad at all.  Clean it up, condense it, and do those to future novels.