I’ve never read any prepper fiction but I’ve certainly read my share of dystopian works and hoped this would fall more on the later. There were a few red flags going in but I chose to ignore them.
Weirdly, one of the best criticisms of preppers was in a young adult novel I read, called “The Girl at the end of the World” where the protagonist assesses a crazed last-man-on-earth after a viral outbreak that leaves very few survivors. She off handedly quips that preppers are gamblers who have to pick their global catastrophe of choice and the man who she encounters is the lottery winner who to prepared for a viral outbreak, as he’s replete with all the hazmat suits and decontamination gear to survive. His survival was sheer luck, not actual insight and thus lies the conundrum of preppers and survivalists. It’s a slap in the face of smarmy attitude of preppers who welcome the oncoming disaster as it’s a chance to prove themselves right… finally, as they look down those who weren’t wise enough to prepare.
The plot really doesn’t take much to kick into gear. There’s a big snowstorm and Maeve on her way to drop her son off almost hits a hermit on his horse in the blizzard. She stops her car and apologizes to the mysterious man. This is where the book gets silly, and spirals downward fast, the mysterious stranger just so happens to be the one man who has the background to correctly assess Maunder Minimum. He’s also an ex-solider, prepper, jack-of-all trades and is the estranged former best friend of her late husband. Despite the vague generic “saved each other more lives than each other could count” relationship our stranger has with the late husband, Maeve doesn’t know him… at all despite her late husband asking this mystery man to watch over her. It’s forced, contrived and ham-fisted. There’s no nuance to be seen, while the writing itself is not terrible, it’s story telling without subtly, deftness or even appropriate ramp up to create tension. Instead, it hits with the stupidity of a late 90s/early 2000s disaster flick. “Plot? That just gets in the way of the special effects!” Again, there’s more depth to be found in young adult dystopian fiction, books written for tweens, not adults.
The stranger quickly inserts himself into her life, by helping her out. The escalation of events is absurdist, by day four of the magic snowstorm that freezes as far south as Texas, civilization has broken down. Yes, in four days civilization is over and people are looting, pillaging and murdering. Also, I say magic as there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the little ice age, as current theory is it was a combination of factors, one being vulcanology as multiple large volcanoes were active prior and during the little ice age nor was the winter unending. While the author does throw crumbs to climate change in a much needed author’s note at the end, she never mentions man’s involvement which strikes me as a bit irresponsible in an era of rampant science illiteracy. Her outro feels more like a bad overture to the new conservative of anti-science platform that climate change is real (which is a silly concession as we have ice core samples, fossils, and many other ways to prove climate change a zilloin times over) but either failing to mentioning man’s role in climate change or denying man’s involvement. It wouldn’t have taken much to make at least the event to feel more plausible, and contain a little nuance by adding in multiple factors that make the storm less magical, (one of the fears of climate change is the fall of trade winds / ocean currents which could lead to larger polar caps and more desertification).
Lastly, the book falls into classic man-pandering. There’s plenty of passages explaining the “role of men” as protectors and the agents of change. Maeve is hopelessly frail, because… she’s a woman. Even her six year old son shows more guile and a collectedness under stress. Yes, her six year old son is more capable of fending off an adult male attacker than her and it happens twice. While I wasn’t expecting political correctness to dictate a fictional book, it struck me as inherently stupid that an adult woman is less capable than a six year old child. It every situation, it takes a man to arrive at a course of action or fend off an attacker. It’s weirdly sexist coming from a female writer and not a criticism I expected to lob at the book. Maeve is worthless and her own real value is an object to be put in peril for our stranger to rescue, and fawn over her pretty red hair.
In the end, the book mostly stays apolitical when it comes to politics, but science and sociology has a wildly and crassly conservative edge. The biggest crime however is the book is stupid. I’ve read worse but I found myself rolling my eyes numerous times and annoyed how forced situations felt. Over all, if this is one of the more original entries in prepper fiction, then all the stereotypes I harbor about the genre are true.
Notably, the narration is good, Kevin Pierce kept me listening and I applaud him for keeping me listening.