Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I love this genre. When I read the book summary I literally thought, "Game on!" and bought it immediately. I loved the One Second After series so I knew I liked the author so it was a no brainer. I bought it for my Kindle so I don't know what page I'm on officially, but I am around 47% of the way through the book and just... stopped reading. I was immediately disappointed because the book opens after the first CME hits, so I felt misled considering the summary I read: In 48 hours, the Earth will be hit by a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) from the Sun, a "Carrington Event" that has the power to shut down and possibly destroy the world's electrical infrastructure. To try and prevent permanent damage, everything goes dark prior to the hit: global communications are shut down; hospital emergency generators are disconnected; the entire internet, media broadcasting, and cell phone systems are turned off. To me the summary made it sound like we would get to see the very beginning of shutting things down, but no. Things have been down for weeks when the story opens and it's another CME that's coming to cause more damage. Okay, no biggie I'll keep going it still sounds cool. I hated the use of all things military in this book (so far). It just seems shoved down our throats like "look at all these military things we know" especially calling Afghanistan "the 'Stan". It was just awkwardly inserted. Also apparently three tours there make you an expert in everything military and makes you excellent in everything even though it doesn't seem he gets any specialized training. Then his wife, whose father owned a specialty gun shop (I think it's said they did additions and personalization to guns) that she inherited, is some kind of ninja who routinely gets called away on secret missions for weeks at a time with top secret clearances and sat phones. So apparently gun shop owners can be commandos just because they own a gun shop? I can buy she's a crack shot, but everything else just seems crazy. At least give us some back story as to how she got into that and have it make some sense. I was so excited about this book because in addition to loving apocalypse stories I love all things astronomy. I was so excited to get quite a bit of science in this book when they were explaining the solar events. But then they just kept explaining the events... and explaining... and explaining. One of the scientists sits in with the president a few times doing most of the explaining and re-explaining. Then after discussing how all of this radiation was likely to kill everyone and everything the president was suddenly shocked when the scientist mentioned the fall out after the event is over and how it can continue to kill people, animals, etc and keep them from easily coming back. I mean, hello! Radiation? Of course it has long term affects on life in the area. Isn't this after the A-bombs have been dropped? Don't we know that things are really bad even after the initial blast? How is the damn president (who has been dealing with this for at least a month now) shocked by this? Then, of course, we get even more explanations. The part that did me in, though, is how Darren and Darla (the main characters) are now taking over Darren's place of employment. He conveniently works at an underground cave that houses an enormous amount of food and other supplies which of course is being prepped for higher ranking officials and their families to come seek shelter. Darren and Darla disapprove (not that they're wrong about that) and decide to wrangle up Darren's former deputy (who they compared to Barney Fife with Barney winning the comparison mind you), the pastor at their church that was never mentioned before this, and a handful of church deacons. So these people decide they are going to take the place over. They bring their handful of cars (I don't remember 3-6 vehicles) drive into the place and with a few guns pointed at the on site leader they take over the base. I just don't get it. Darren even has the audacity to get pissed at the leader when he says something impolite to his poor wife while she is going on her holier than thou tirade. They are going to fill the cave with kids along with some teachers and medical staff, not the parents or anything. So these kids are going to come out knowing how to re-seed the area so they can grow food, right? Doubtful. I would bet the government would have people whose sole purpose is to make things inhabitable when this is over. I can understand wanting save all the kids, but damn at least give them the help they need to survive when they run out of food in the cave. I'm hoping it gets better, but I'm not holding hope. I'll keep plodding along for now. Hopefully I'll update this soon with a completely changed mind.