Review for One Second After

Review for One Second After

The Good: This novel is well thought out and executed.  It deals with the aftermath of an EMP attack on the United States.  It does an excellent job showing how society would fall apart--slow at first, and then exponentially.  The author does a great job illustrating the devastating effects of this type of an attack in a powerful and memorable way.  The conflict slowly builds as people realize their predicament of the their resources.  

The Bad: The characters are flat, dull, and boring.  There are only a few times where the characters seem to connect with the reader, such as the time that the girl dies, but by and large, it is difficult to feel anything for these people.  There are some great ideas presented in this book, but there are a lot concepts that don't seem realistic. For example, after two or three months of the event, the towns people are already beginning to starve, and then they end up going an entire year after that.  

The other thing I also did not care for is the conflict with the Posy.  The Posse does not show up until really late in the book and the villainous rabble are pretty static bad guys (ie, there is nothing special about them).  We don't get to see any of the psychology behind this villain or his Posse.  The main conflict also turns into hardly any conflict at all.  The author glazes over the action and does a half-hearted attempt at explaining to the reader how the battle took place.  The triage after the battle is, I thought, well done, however.  I was disappointed at how this interesting plot point was just casually thrown in and then tossed aside.  

The last thing that I could not stand was that the author constantly was quoting from other movies, books, or music to make some emotional point.  It was like he was saying that as the writer he could not come up with a way to explain it but that this certain part of this movie could.  

Overall: 8

Characters: 4

Plot: 8