Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This lazy young adult novel piggybacks off works that overshadow it. My biggest criticism of this book is that Wendig has merely hijacked (dare I say stolen) plot lines from far better authors. Wanderers is 75% Crichton (Andromeda Strain & Prey), 5% King (The Stand), 5% McCarthy (The Road), 5% Camus (The Plague), 5% Gibson/Clarke (Neuromancer/2001) and finally 5% Romero (Living Dead). Wanderers is straight Dennis Leary joke stealing bad and unoriginal. The slightest attempt at novelty using injections from social media gently erodes over the course of the too long young adult novel into ideas that have already been done before and better. Wendig’s writing is unchallenging and youthfully comical with the author lobbing softballs at the reader to keep the pages turning. There is a veil of “Crichton-esque” research but only to the level that Wendig feels he needs to prove he’s read the cliff notes of the book assigned as homework. Unlike other post apocalyptic novels that utilize violence to further character development and a sense of dread, Wendig forces it in unnecessary ways just because he “has” to (think later Walking Dead). His writing allows 200+ pages a day without absorbing anything meaningful or forcing the reader to think and pause or even look up a word. Wanderers suffers from lazy writing and descriptions that sound like Wendig did a lot of Shift+F7’ing. Finally, for the elephant (or donkey) in the room. I’m not sure if Wendig is trying to grandstand or apologize, but the never ending brow beating of cultural, social, political and anti-religious overtones flog the reader at every turn of the page. The soapbox speeches ruin any originality that Wendig manages to squeeze into a story that’s already been told, unless you enjoy consuming ideology masquerading as post apocalyptic fan fiction. For a bearded white guy he seems to really hate bearded white guys. This book really got under my skin for the wrong reasons, first and foremost this story is lifted from better authors than Wendig. Secondly, the writing mimics young adult literature in it’s laziness and lastly, the non stop social, political and anti-religious lectures left me worn out til the bitter sequel evoking end. TLDR; I feel like I was being shamed and talked down to by an English Lit professor who knows “more” about the “real” world and keeps dropping literary references to prove it. The only thing this novel made me think about was which UPS store to drop it off to return to Amazon.