Author’s Blurb:
“Long after a pandemic swept the world, society has crumbled. A remnant of human civilization ekes out an existence in a closed community called Sanctuary. To control their population, the ruling brethren use a lottery, the winners of which join the new Gods that reside beyond the walls. But when her daughter is chosen, Anna Charles discovers the lottery is fixed by despotic church leader, Roman Quail. Now in a frantic bid to save her family, she flees into the hostile environment outside Sanctuary where only the strongest survive, and where all their Gods are dead. Literally.”
Empty-Grave Review
The Good:
1. The writing style was very readable.
2. The pacing was decent and kept us moving along.
3. The book was for the most part error-free. Great proofing.
The Bad:
1. For me, the characters lacked depth. The characterizations seemed random and heavy-handed. I found it very hard to care about any of them or their plights.
2. The author was clearly shooting for a moral but whiffed. What I got is that reading books instead of tending to the sexual needs of your spouse = major catastrophe.
The Ugly – There is more hole than plot: **SPOILER ALERTS**
1. To pull off an “everyone forgot” plot you need to establish why. There is no way a community full of parents is going to forget to tell their kids that zombies are bad–which is essentially what had to happen in this story’s premise.
2. A band of bloodthirsty marauders, that has been presumably ravaging the land for a long time, is completely unaware there is an entire city full of chumps less than a days ride away.
3. The self-contained Sanctuary has no problem providing food or water for all its people but the “savage” people living outside a major city–with easy access to canned food they can afford to trade–have resorted to cannibalism?
4. There are still people to cannibalize roaming the countryside when so much time has passed that an entire community has forgotten zombies are bad and established their own little religion.
- $1.49
