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Imagine a power mad man hijacking the United States nuclear arsenal and launching missiles with the intent of getting the US destroyed by the retaliation. Imagine it working. And when the whole world, when all is lost, people trying to survive in the world that's left afterward; a world with no government, no law and where only the strong survive. This is a world where radiation is a deadly threat that one has to regularly guard against, where the population has been massively culled, where women and children are treated as property by most and where there are no police to call. It's The Survivors, and it's Life After War.
Angela White has given us a masterpiece of disaster. The cities are destroyed. Resources are rare and getting rarer. One of the most important factions in the story can't even find bullets for their rifles, although they practice regularly with their pistols. Tribes of slavers roam the world with no one to stop them. Mutations abound; Creatures affected by the radiation. Giant ants, spiders with more than eight legs, weird birds, it's all there.
But there's more than just the standard tropes featured in every post-apocalyptic story. White includes magic in her world. When I first caught hints of this, I thought I was headed into a setting similar to that of the Rifts tabletop role playing game. So far though, that's not the case. Magic appears to be extremely rare in the world White has created, at least so far.
And I say so far because it seems to me that there is a lot of worldbuilding still not done at the end of the first book. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's just that when I finished The Survivors I was looking forward to finding out more about the use of magic, how it fits in the world and where this is all heading. White has revealed one large group of threats, but not how they'll affect the attempts of another group to rebuild and salvage something possible. The group that we're all following hasn't even decided where to settle yet. They're still exploring, trying to figure out where they can go to live and build a society.
I said that magic seems rare because we don't see much of it, but it may be more common off screen, or become something that future generations who more aptitude for as things move forward (the series is twenty-one books long) or it might not. Magic items may be a thing, or they may not. Magic has some usefulness in battle but it's not enough to win a pitched battle all by itself, unless it is and there's more to see. I mean, it's obvious that there's more out there but we don't know what yet. I'm not even sure if I'm making this more of a big deal than it should be.
*SHRUG*
I guess I'll figure it out eventually. I plan on reading more of the series.
That's to say nothing of the characters themselves: Angela is a woman caught between two men. I know that love triangles aren't as popular among some audiences as they are with others and I get that, but this is a love triangle more in the vein of The Hunger Games where it's a side plot than with Twilight where the love triangle is the whole story. Angela goes through an amazing character arc which I won't describe in detail as it would spoil a lot of the story, Angela being the closest thing the story has to a main character.
Angela is out to find her son. They were separated during the war. Along the way she manages to hook up with her old buddy Marc. He helps Angela out and trains her to be a warrior, having himself been Marine Recon for awhile. It's not exactly a match made in Heaven (read the story to find out why) but it works after a fashion and they end up hot on the trail of her son and the man who helped her raise him. It's a wild premise and a wild ride.
The action scenes in the book are well done. I don't get the impression that White is necessarily a Larry Correia level gun expert, but she knows enough to have a person who uses a revolver reload it with a speedloader and that puts her ahead of a lot of the other authors I've read. A lot of the hand to hand stuff makes sense and it's really exciting so that's a bonus. I have a sneaking suspicion that White may have taken a class or two in some type of martial art. I don't know that, but I did when I was a kid and a lot of what's written here comes across as the way things would actually work. Not that it's all high-flying karate kicks. Some of it reads like a backyard brawl but that makes sense, too. Not everyone has training and some of the people that don't are pretty hard core in their own right.
So yes, asskickery does indeed abound and that's a good thing. There's a more human side to the story though, too. We get everything from the aforementioned love triangle to mother/son, a conniving bitch, concerned leaders, power mad leaders (not the same person) and animal lovers. White seems to have a solid grasp on the human condition and she puts it into her work.
I have only one complaint about The Survivors and I debated whether or not I should even include it. On one hand, I feel like I shouldn't. It's not about story, or characters, or action or anything I would ordinarily include in a review. On the other hand, it definitely effected my enjoyment of the book, and that's something I definitely review for.
So anyway, here it is:
The Survivors: Life After War, Book One is available for purchase at the following link. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.
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