Review: A nice idea, but it doesn't flow well.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 15, 2010
An interesting idea, but I would not recommend this book to my friends.  There are some errors.  I'm not sure if they are from bad formatting or from author/editor error, so I won't fault the author on that.  However, I do fault the author for not being able to decide if he was writing for an adult audience or a YA audience.  I wish he had made up his mind.  I'm not sure how to explain it, but sometimes it felt childish and other times it seemed a bit 'too much'.  YA-lit is a tough thing to write.  It's always a fine line between being too watered down and being over the top.Also, everything seems 'too easy' and 'too convenient'.  Everything the kids need falls in their laps.  They want to build a better shelter - a guy from a logging camp shows up.  A girl is pregnant - they find a nurse.  It would be interesting to see how the kids had handled the birth of a baby with no medical help.  It would have also been nice to see the kids fail once in a while.  I know there were bad guys around and they killed people and caused problems, but I'm not talking about that kind of thing.  It would have been nice if one of the kids ideas had not worked.  "Lets make this...Lets build that" and every idea works out perfectly.  That's not realistic.  It's ok to fail at a task.  People learn from their mistakes and people can learn from reading other people's mistakes too.I'm all for supporting new authors, and I do give the guy credit for coming up with a good idea.  I just wish he had proof read a little better and did some re-writes to fix parts of the story that don't flow well.  Also, the first chapter could be dropped completely and it would make the story flow much better. The first chapter sounds like a scifi novel from the 50s, then the rest of the book has a totally different tone.