Review: had high hopes for it
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 10 4, 2013
A book I got for free in the Kindle edition a few days ago.First off, I read the whole thing, so that fact by itself gets a book a minimum of 2 stars in my rating system.I liked the premise. There was a lot to work with and the potential was very high. The caldera at Yellowstone explodes, causing widespread damage and loss of power in the western US.What I did not like.Writing mistakes. Bunches of them. Typos, spell check errors, spelling errors, grammar issues, etc. While I won't say the mistakes ruined the book for me, they were certainly a distraction.Images. There are a bunch of images included. The Kindle and its many apps don't do justice to images, and the way the images were haphazardly inserted did not add to the story any. The formatting around the images was almost like someone just tossed them in after the fact. It made the book look very amateurish. Many of the images were taken from government sources and from Wikipedia and credited that way. Others were not credited at all. Just sloppy work. In any case, they really did not serve much of a purpose IMO other than taking up space. The book would have been better off without the images.Sloppy science. Among other bad science, the book claimed the earthquakes caused nuclear waste at Hanford in Washington state to explode, something that just cannot happen. It might cause leaks, but explosions just are not in the cards. I would guess the author is not a fan of nuclear power from the almost gleeful way he described the disaster there. In another place the book refers to global warming changing to global ice age. Given that global warming has now been shown to be mostly a hoax, one would think the author would not have used that in his work.For some reason gangs in Seattle are armed with zip guns and sticks with nails in them, along with a few 22 pistols. Why gang members chose such inappropriate weapons when they would have access to whatever they want made little sense to me. The book even describes the gang members carrying Molotov cocktails made from kerosene, something that is almost certain to fail to function as a Molotov cocktail, and where the heck would gang members in Seattle get kerosene?There are some poorly done sex scenes, almost juvenile in many respects. It made me suspect in a few places that the author was a high school kid.Way too much vivid description of the damage. Part of the issue I had with this was it was very repetitive in nature. I get it. A lot of stuff was broken. But repeating every few pages the description of the Space Needle falling over in Seattle just did not add anything to the story.A lot of the action described was unrealistic. In one case a female skier skied up a mountain to get away from the ash clouds. It seemed like she went up the hill in way too short of a time frame. Other places there were people traveling long distances on bad roads but were described as going at speeds in excess of 100 mph. Just not going to happen.There were some other plausibility issues as well. Stores and gas stations were taking credit cards even though the power was off and phones and other communications lines were down.I dithered between giving it 2 or 3 stars, and ended up giving it two. It is a higher end 2-star book, and I still enjoyed it even with the many things that annoyed me. The book has a lot to offer if the author had the patience to go in and clean it up.