Review: Best Character Development I've Seen in Some Time
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 21, 2012
One would think that what is essentially a first-person journal would suffer when it comes to the development of the other characters. After all, everything gets filtered through the "voice" and opinions of the character presenting the chronicle of events. Not so with this series. Each character is not only an individual personality, but they behave exactly according to what a person of that intelligence, skills, personality facets, etc. would in the situations that arise in the story. This first novel is light years ahead of the prologue/teaser that precedes it. There are some minor things that require a bit more suspension of disbelief than you are accustomed to allowing, but that's truly the only quibble I have. An example that doesn't spoil anything that isn't revealed in the product description - it's the end of the world. Big bomb. Kablooey. While it definitely makes things inconvenient for the people in the story, the fact that there is little to nothing said about radiation sickness is a bit of a tell that the author is going to be a bit free with the facts about nuclear fallout. Since too much realism about a nuclear war tends to leave a writer without living characters, this is understandable.What elevates this trilogy above the thousands of other post-apocalyptic stories out there however is the author's gift for finding unique ways of describing things. Melanie Edmonds is an amazing new voice. The gift of a truly great pop songwriter (Lennon/McCartney, Difford/Tilbrook etc) is in the ability to find a unique way to express something every person has felt and can immediately relate to. It isn't as easy as it sounds. Try coming up with a better expression for how breakup songs affect us when a relationship goes bad than Squeeze's classic, "And in the bar the piano man pounds another nail in my heart." Well, every few pages in the Apocalypse Blog books, Melanie finds some way to describe a situation - a metaphor or simile - that I've never heard before. Discovering each one as I was reading along was like tasting a new food for the first time, but in all the good ways.Once I started, I couldn't put the series down. I literally read the entire batch over the course of a 3-day weekend. Now I'm going back to read them again, only this time I'm going much slower so I can savor the flow of the narrative all the more. I can't recall the last time I tore through a set of books and immediately started over again at the beginning.Awesome stuff. Simply awesome. I probably won't write reviews for the last two books in the series. If you aren't hooked by the end of book 1 the others won't hold much for you. Personally, I found that each book was better and more exciting than the last. I got caught up in each of the lives of the "Seekers" and when one became injured or endangered I found myself putting off household chores to read on and find out the result of the character's fate.I'm disabled and a voracious reader. It keeps my mind busy when I'm stuck in the house for long periods in my wheelchair and it beats staring at the idiot box with 200 channels of nothing happening. This Trilogy and Hugh Howey's "Wool" books are the best independent reads I've found to date and I generally read 2-3 books in a given week. That should tell you something about just how well written these books are.