Departure
I forgot why I even have this A.G. Riddle book in my Audible collection, but I decided to start reading it without knowing anything about it and…it took me a little by surprise.
Its easiest to split the book into three thirds. The first third is your basic disaster porn book. You have a plane that is now crashed and half the plane looks like its separated from the other half. You’re in the middle of nowhere and now folks have to band together to survive until help arrives. You are introduced to the principal characters pretty quickly and you don’t really have much info on any of them until basically the 2nd half.
So the first third is actually reasonably enjoyable as far as disaster porn is concerned. You have the mix of “deer in headlight” folks, the guys who know what to do and how to organize folks, and then the guys who don’t know what to do and only cause trouble. Watching how each of this is resolved is reasonably satisfying. There’s some inkling that not all is as it seems in this first third of the book, but its a reasonably well done diaster porn book, thus far.
Then the 2nd third hits, and that’s when you go “oh maybe this isn’t just a disaster porn book” after all. Except you’d be wrong, just that its a different disaster on a different scale, but at this point the book starts to pull on some of the sci-fi. You get a mysterious disease that ages folks prematurely, you have the non-existent help that should have arrived now, you have no gps or cell signal, and those glimpses back in the first third starts to become more like searchlights. This is where the background of the world is given in more detail and you start piecing together the situation that the protagonists have fallen into. You then get quite a bit of action along with your history lessons and you start to realize why the characters and pieces of the story have fallen as they have. This is easily the longest third of the book but it does double duty of showing the science fiction of the world as well as more character buildling.
Then you get to the last third of the book, where the author tries to wrap things up in a neat bow tie, and mostly succeeds.
So, I’d say I enjoyed this book and its hard to review this book without spoilers, so I won’t spoil much. But lets just say that this was a mostly enjoyable mix of science fiction, some interpersonal dynamics stuff and a lot of “hold your disbelief button tight”. Its written in a style that’s very open to becoming a film or tv series, so don’t be surprised if you see it. Its got pretty much everything that folks want in their mind candy. I was in that mode, so it was a perfect fit for me. 2025’s been a WEIRD year.