Review: Original and moving second book in the series
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 17, 2013
The Breakers universe has some unique angles in the PA genre - there is an apocalypse in the form of a pandemic that wipes out 99.9% of the world's population, and just as the remnants of humanity are trying to reassemble, an alien invasion twists everything into knots.Robertson's first book was ambitious and rough around the edges, but this second volume shows a marked improvement in overall writing style. (Thankfully, we are down to only a couple of instances of "keened/keening" in this installment.)Now that the Breakers universe is set up, Robertson is going exploring. In Melt Down, the plot centers around two pairs of siblings - an older sister/adolescent brother and an older brother/adolescent brother. In the second case, the "adolescent" brother is 25, but shows far more immaturity than the 13-year-old boy in the parallel storyline.While giving us just enough new information about the aliens in Breakers to generate a whole new set of questions (they wiped out humanity because they saw it as a foreign body to mother Earth?)...Robertson succeeds in writing a double story of how blood and family triumph over everything. The brother/sister and brother/brother combos go through absolute Hell, mentally, emotionally and physically. Yet the bonds of family make all the difference in the story.Fans of the first book get a bonus in that Walt shows up on the second - in a re-telling of an interesting chapter of Breakers I and in an epilogue that opens up great anticipation for the third volume, Knifepoint.Only minor disappointments for me: I wish Alden's character wasn't written as thinly as he's described physically - maybe we'll get a chance to see this character in a future book. The very small segment of humanity that's left is prone to evil-doing that is written with little imagination at times. And we still don't know a lot about the hows and whys of the pandemic/invasion, although the idea of the aliens "adopting" humans is intriguing near the end of this book. Overall, this is a significant move forward in the series and I plan to start in on Knifepoint this weekend.