Book Review: Prepared By Courtney Konstantin

She thought she was prepared for the end of the world… until it actually came. Alex Duncan is a mother, a sister— and the daughter of a doomsday prepper. She always thought her father was insane, raving about an apocalypse she never believed in, but when a plague hits the United States and the dead no longer stay dead, Alex discovers heeding her deceased father’s advice is what will keep her family alive. Before he died, Alex’s father created a compound in Montana just in case situations like this arose. Hell has arrived on earth.
 
The dead walk, hungry for human flesh. Living in a highly populated city like Las Vegas makes the reality of the plague imminent to Alex. With little time to spare, Alex must make split-second decisions to prevent her family from being devoured. Facing the end, Alex has three goals. Escape Las Vegas. Get to the compound. Survive. As the outside world crumbles and grows darker, Alex faces adversity from not just the infected, but the uninfected as well. Government assistance is nowhere in sight, and rumors fly that the nation’s only solution to the growing plague is execution.
 
Not everyone will outlast the plague. Doomsday is here. Will Alex be up to the challenge, or fall, and rise again as one of the undead? 

My Review: 
Alex grew up in a prepper household with a paranoid father, and the lessons he taught her will prove to be vital when the zombie apocalypse arrives on her doorstep. Her husband Blake returns home from a business trip, bitten and infected, unaware that he will soon turn and try to attack Alex, their kids and their housekeeper. Alex knows her family compound is the only safe place to go but first she has to gather supplies and then try to find a way out of the city which is being guarded by military checkpoints. 

My first random thought on lifting this book from the zombie bookshelf is why is there a bit of nuclear war art in the form of a mushroom cloud on the cover, when the disaster in the book is a viral thing causing a zombie apocalypse?

Alex irritates me because she is that typical female character who is slow to react to what is going on. She watches her husband eat the housekeeper and sees the woman rise up with shocking injuries yet she still insists on trying to talk to them rather than get on with the fact that there is a zombie apocalypse happening. It seems to take forever for her to actually deal with the zombies in her house, which is bizarre when she has two children to protect. And this was after her sister told her about the zombie like attacks on the news. She is supposed to be keeping quiet so the zombies outside won't be attracted to the house so she plays DVDs and sings with the kids to pass the time! Alex finally starts to get organised by raiding houses nearby for supplies and finding a suitable vehicle but ruins it by not planning several routes out of the city. Instead she drives to the freeway entrances which are blocked, something her prepper father would have got annoyed about if he was there. She should've been looking at secondary roads in advance instead of wasting fuel driving about aimlessly! 

Alex then decides to stop in a car park to get out and kill zombies to try and save a few strangers, putting her children in more danger instead of just getting out of the built up area of the city. She then parks for a few days and decides for some strange reason to take the kids out for a walk as they are getting bored and of course they get chased by a zombie. She really is not thinking at all! It gets worse when she decides to give some of her supplies to a group of strangers who ask her for food, and then she gets upset when they take a chance to rob her and flee when Alex is fending off a zombie attack. I really wish she would stop doing stupid crap and risking her own death, which would leave her kids unprotected! I'm not sure about Marcus though-he is too smug and annoying when they first meet and I'm surprised that she allowed him anywhere near her family with his attitude.

Another thing that bugs me is when we see the flashback to the day that Alex is taken miles away from home by her father and left in the middle of nowhere to see if she has learned his lessons and can find her way home. It was an interesting enough story but I found it weird that it was shoved between events at the climax of the book as it had the effect of bringing the story to a screeching halt and slowing everything down. It would have been better in the middle of the story rather than near the end.

From what I've said about the book, it might sound as if I hated it. Actually it was a decent read. Other than the flaws I mentioned, Alex was at least capable of looking after her family, compared to the whinging dumb females that are so often seen in the apocalypse genre. I liked that she was coming up with the plans to solve the problems instead of waiting around crying for a kind man to do it for her. I liked her interaction with her adopted children who she has taken responsibility for, and the way they learn on the journey. The action scenes with the zombies and the bad people are well written and interesting, and I also liked some of the characters that Alex comes into contact with along the way, especially Margaret.   

I've seen that the second book in the series is about her sister Max and the journey that she undertakes to get to the family compound and the third book follows her brother Rafe. I'm interested in what happens to these characters so I am likely to read on with the series when time and money allows.

Read April 2019.
3.5 stars.