Aurora

Rounding up from 4.5. I really liked this book - clifi with a lot of talk about how the people actually work to survive - from a middle class and uber rich perspective.

Aurora is an action/suspense novel premised on what would happen if a solar flare were to disrupt our electric grid. This was an easy book to get lost in, and I thought the premise was smart and interesting. I thought the characters were pretty well written, although a few of the “bad guys” fell a bit flat for me.

I would have preferred more communcal front-lawn gardening than the ex-husband's criminal escapades. This reads like a movie script, and therefore goes down easy. And it leaves you with the question, are you a prepper or an improvisor?

3 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Dystopian time where an event with the sun makes a worldwide power outage. It definitely gave me anxious feelings on what me and my family would do incase of a worldwide power outage. The thought of social structure being completely unraveled and left to a every man for himself situation. Cultivating food and gathering water while trying to stay safe in an environment where you can't call for help.

I didn't give it higher stars because I wanted more to happen within the story. There's a lot of pointless details that didn't help the story along. Would've like to see more of the dystopian aspects. Aubrey and Scott where my favorite characters I enjoyed their banter. I also enjoyed Brady, he was the only male character that wasn't insufferable. Thom (Aubrey's brother) was so narcissistic and full of himself that his chapters made me mad.

The end of the book was more where the action was. Exciting things were happening and character development was being revealed. The ending is what bumped this up to a 3 star.

I tried my had at the audiobook while I physically read but the narrator just wasn't my favorite. Probably contributed to my mediocre feeling towards this book.

This was a fun, quick read that should have been twice as long. There were time jumps that encapsulated a lot of story progression that should have been explored in more detail, foreshadowing for things that never actually came to pass, and characters that deserved a lot more attention than they got. That being said, I'm not mad at the time I spent with this book; I'm just disappointed that it felt kind of incomplete.