Book Review: Going Home by A American (The Survivalist #1)

Imagine you’re driving down the interstate, it’s Friday and all you can think about is getting your weekend started. Then to begin the ruination of your much anticipated weekend the grating tone of the Emergency Alert System flashes over the radio, then promptly dies.

This is the beginning of a 250 mile odyssey for Morgan Carter. Morgan works on the road and finds himself far from home when his car dies, as well as his Blackberry and every other piece of electronics he has. With no idea what has occurred he reluctantly finds himself on shanks’ mare carrying that ridiculous pack that everyone made fun of him for keeping in the car. Morgan has to find his way across the state of Florida, from Tallahassee to the heart of the state in Lake County.

Along his way he has to seek out food, water and shelter where he can, not to mention keeping himself from being killed by any number of now scared and desperate people. During his travels he will try and help where he can, but that can turn out to be a costly mistake. We live in a wonderfully modern society where anything we want is a mouse click away. The lights come on with the flip of a switch and even a child can turn on the faucet at the sink and water always comes out. But what if it all went away? Could you face what Morgan faces, could you make the decisions he has to make? Life and sometimes death in the blink of an eye, could you do it?

My Review: 
When I first discovered prepper fiction, there were several authors and series mentioned as 'must read' and this was one of them. I did however see mixed reviews about it on Goodreads which made this into a priority read this year to see how I got on with it.

Morgan is on his way home at the end of a work trip when an EMP hits the country and his car comes to a shuddering halt. He gets his emergency supplies ready, decides what needs to be left behind and starts the 250 mile trek home across Florida to Lake County where his anxious family will be waiting for him. On the route home he will need to find his own food, water and shelter, and try to avoid population centres as he doesn't want to draw attention to himself. He will find friends and foes on the way, encounter death and destruction and be prepared to do whatever it takes to get back to his family.

The book begins with the EMP hitting and personally I found Morgan to be a bit slow to get moving. Yes of course he needed time to sort his gear, which we get a full description of but it is well into the second day before he actually starts to get moving. I think I would personally want to get on with it as soon as my gear was ready rather than sleep overnight and not get going until others were already on the move. However that is really just splitting hairs and it didn't bother me. I'm always a bit iffy about just how quickly society seems to break down in these books as I think it would be days without power before the first discontent would really start so having Morgan attacked at the first town he comes to by the gang who try to rob him didn't quite sit with me. But of course in a disaster like that who knows exactly how it would play out so I wasn't bothered by that so much.

By the time he has got to the third town he has actually killed three people-a thief and two would-be rapists. Now I have no qualms about this kind of human garbage being killed in books as they pretty much deserve what they get but it is a bit worrying that an ordinary guy has to kill that many people in the first two towns that he goes into and doesn't seem that bothered by it! It doesn't say much for our society if this is what would happen so soon after a big power cut. It did get the story moving along though and we see that Morgan will do anything it takes to survive and won't stand by and watch others get hurt. Morgan then teams up reluctantly with Jessica, a stranded college student who doesn't want to walk home on her own, and man mountain Thad who is also heading in the same direction. 

For someone who wanted to avoid people on the journey, Morgan does seem to end up trying to help everyone and their dog at the expense of their own supplies, which does seem a bit dumb considering he needs every resource to get himself home to his family. It leads him to making dumb decisions like giving away water to a couple who are obviously going to be dead within hours. Wasting water on people already doomed is not smart when you have to find your own water on such a long journey. He tries to help a woman who then demands more from him and tries to encourage her boyfriend to steal his supplies. Not learning from that, our trio then try to help a couple with kids and that almost leads to Morgan being killed and delays his journey by a week while he recovers.

The best characters in this book are Thad and Sarge. I actually found myself wishing that the story followed Thad as he went looking for help from his friend Sarge to get home. Sarge is the grumpy former soldier who is a prepper and has all his military skills to fall back on. I loved this guy and later in the book I found the chapters following him and his friends to be the most interesting. In fact I may have DNFed it if it had just been following the journey of Morgan, so Sarge kind of saves the book. Jessica was annoying and ditzy at times but that was nothing compared to what morons were in her family and community who we meet later on. Quite a few of them needed a slap or twenty for what they were doing. That whole section of the book was very frustrating and annoying to me, just as the author wanted the reader to feel about it.

I did find the book a bit over descriptive for my personal tastes. We get the full inventory of everything he had in his car and I admit that some of that detail just went right over my head. I don't think we really needed that or a full description of how he set up camp and dismantled his camp every single day, as a lot of that was repetitive. I don't need the details of every guard duty, every meal, every time someone had a call of nature. I feel that some of it could have been cut out. There was also a ton of product placement in it and it was being shoved it at any opportunity-if you are lying down on a bed I don't need to know what mattress it is or what company cookware you are using today. That was all a bit much at times. The changing tense was also a bit annoying. I wasn't greatly keen on the evil government being out to get the people plot that was running through it.

Overall I kind of have mixed feelings about the book. There were parts of it that I really liked, with Sarge and his team and Thad's homecoming. Some parts of the journey were interesting and other parts not so much.  I just felt that the female characters let the book down. Jessica making excuses for her family and some of her whiny moments really annoyed me and it looked like Morgan's wife was similar. If the second book in the series had been all about Thad and Sarge I would maybe have read it but to be honest I wasn't interested enough in Morgan and Jessica to continue with the series. There are better books out there in the genre for sure and I'd rather read them.

Read January 2019
2.5 stars.