Review: The ending has a tight and simple finality to it
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 24, 2014
The Flu 2:  Healing is Jacqueline Druga’s follow up to The Flu (A Novel of The Outbreak).  While I liked the first book, I found myself engrossed in the second, and to be honest, I absolutely loved it.  Healing picks up where the first book left off and we find Mick Owens taking his two sons Chris and Tigger Hughes on a much needed backwoods getaway after the devastation of the global pandemic from the first book.  The boys are dealing with the loss of not only their brother Dustin, but their grandmother and their mother Dylan as well.  Mick has lost the love of his life and best friend; the trio is simply grief stricken.  They set out toward Pennsylvania in order to get some R&R;, only to stop at a small campsite for the night since traffic jams and blockades just outside of Pittsburg have hindered their travels.  They meet a school teacher by the name of Ethan who has set up the camp with his mother, taking in orphaned children and trying to give them support and some semblance of a family.  Ethan invites Mick along to a nearby town to help scavenge supplies and look for more children.  All the while as we are following the story of our main character, we are also following others.  Lexi and Bill, the CDC field doctor and California’s “patient zero” from the first book, are making their way east since the entire western United States has become a viral wasteland.  Back in Lodi we find Tom, Dylan’s father, and the famous Lars Rayburn (my personal favorite) are attempting to rebuild and bring Lodi back from the catastrophe of the flu that destroyed the entire world.  We meet a new character, Jonah Briggs, dishonorably discharged from the military.  Briggs has worked quickly and carefully to rally private militias and survival groups in order to bring back order and defend America’s grounds at his New York base.You find yourself wondering how all these character’s stories will intertwine and then out of nowhere, it hits you.  Where there is devastation and the government has disappeared, you get the rebels; the sour apples that think they can run the world and in the midst of their marauding, ruin it for the few survivors trying to make it on their own.  Mick and Ethan arrive back at the camp in time to find the camp has been raided, their people killed, and the children missing.  Briggs discovers that one of his groups has gone rogue, starting their own militia in Eerie, PA and bringing down anything and anyone that doesn’t join them.  Lexi and Bill discover a new terror in Las Vegas that could very well mean the end of the world all over again.  It’s a battle against time, between the good and evil inside of every man and woman left in the now scarcely populated United States of America.  Will Mick find Chris and Tigger?  Can Jonah Briggs win the battle against this rogue militia and save all that he’s worked so hard for?  Can the remaining Lars Rayburn and Lexi stop this new found horror from ripping everyone’s worlds apart so soon after they’ve barely recovered from the flu?Those are all questions that you will have to find the answers to by picking up a copy of Druga’s Flu 2:  Healing.It’s an exciting read that pleasantly surprised me.  There was no love triangle drama or overly combative dialogue between characters.  The story paced itself extremely well and as you got further to the finish, every page begged you to turn it in order to satisfy your curiosity.  Druga does an excellent job of expressing the panic and grief of our surviving characters from the first book in the series.  There is a very clear conveyance of devastation and emptiness in every sub story told, bringing the entire novel together in one whole package that does not disappoint.  These are normal, everyday people that are struggling to cope with loss while trying to grasp the concept of “life after the flu.”  One of my favorite lines from the book that could best explain everything going on would be a man by the name of Ross who owns the funeral parlor in Lodi.  In a conversation with Tom he says, “People need to see that life goes on.”  And that really is the bottom line in any post-apocalyptic fiction.  The world may have ended, but for those who have survived, it continues.  A new addition to Flu 2 was Chris’s journal entries.  I enjoyed these because it was refreshing to have the point of view of a teenager that has come through so much and still maintains some sort of positivity after coming through the end of all he’s ever known.The only downside of the book is that it could have gone through another round of editing and although the dialogue between the very different characters has improved since the first book, sometimes it tends to drag out and take you away from what is really going on.In conclusion, Druga’s “Flu-ology” is probably best read back to back for new readers, and readers of the first book will be in for a ride with Flu 2:  Healing.  The ending has a tight and simple finality to it, she could end the series here or even open it up to future adventures for our remaining team of heroes.