Review: A Decent Read
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 3, 2014
In his story THE BIG ONE, Kevin E. Ready asks the question, what would happen if Southern California were indeed hit by a monster earthquake? Ready’s answer proves to be both thought-provoking and entertaining.Mr. Ready has exceptional technical knowledge of his subject matter and he takes the reader through several different likely scenarios of what would happen during and right after the monster quake hits. Including a couple scenarios most people don’t even think about, like what would happen to the financial system not only locally, but nationally and globally after a big quake. I found the factoids at the beginning of the chapter to not only be informative, but they helped to ground the reader into that particular chapter.The characters the Mr. Ready creates to take the reader through the various scenarios are for the most part well done, but several are too one-dimensional. And as other reviewers have already mentioned there are numerous spelling, grammatical and continuity errors scatter thorough out the book. While these errors are for the most part minor, they do distract the reader and since Mr. Ready is charging for his product they cannot be overlooked. I think improved storytelling would have made THE BIG ONE a more enjoyable read.THE BIG ONE is a big book, at 358 printed pages, the average novel weighs in at between 200 and 250 pages for the most part. Perhaps Mr. Ready should have figured a way to tell the story in two parts or maybe a trilogy. I think the storytelling would have been better in a series of smaller formats.With all that said, THE BIG ONE contains exceptional technical knowledge and decent enough storytelling for me to recommend it to anyone.