Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Writing a book about your deeply held beliefs is a dangerous thing. Done well, the results can be quite amazing, but there are just so many pitfalls when you are writing about things you believe passionately - you can forget that you're supposed to be writing fiction. This is what makes Wick so dreadfully bad, and why despite giving it many second chances, I abandoned it partway through. I'd read a bit about Bunker before starting the book and so I was familiar with his off-grid lifestyle and views, and fully expected a novel that would affirm those ideas. I was interested to see what that would look like. But here's the thing about good novels: they need characters who have interesting motivations and inner conflicts and who are changed in some way by what happens to them in the course of the book. As far as I plowed through this, that never happened. The characters simply keep telling us Mr. Bunker's views on the world, and none of them have any conflict to resolve - the story is how a man goes off on a journey and with each step, discovers how right Michael Bunker is about everything. We get no interesting backstory and no insight into what makes the protagonist (or anybody else) tick. He meets people who speak to him in mini-essays about modern life (it's really some of the most painfully cringe-inducing dialog I've read in some time) and then he goes on his way. And when we find out what the terrible world events happening are - after being already told them earlier, so mostly you're just wondering when our hero will figure it out, since he's been told the same thing we know - it's so ludicrous that the book goes off the rails completely under the weight of the bizarre Ayn Rand meets Red Dawn plot. Worst of all, because the plot is ridiculous and the characters are so monotonous and unreal, the book commits the worst possible since for this sort of fiction: it's mind-numbingly boring. I know that Mr. Bunker is an ardent spokesman for self-publishing authors. It's a shame, because this book makes a strong case for why editors are useful. There's a seed of something very good here, but Mr. Bunker needs to work on his writing craft to make it something readable. As an editor would likely have told him.