No Safety In Numbers - Dayna Lorentz
- Ali Mark
- Dec 2, 2015
- 2 min read
One day you're at the mall shopping, and moments later, you're on lockdown with a jock (and the rival school's jocks), an Indian girl and her family, the Senator and her family (right place, right time?), and a fast food employee who, you guessed it, is a poor, non-white male. A bomb is found, but that single bomb isn't actually a bomb, and it's hooked up to the air vents of a three story mall. It takes you through the view of these 4 main characters, on their journey through hell.
Goodreads readers ranked this book a 3.53 and I'd recommend it if you're into:
deadly bomb viruses with hazmat suits
suspenseful story lines
generic/basic writing and language
good exploration of the characters.
An average book at best, there's too many unanswered questions, and too many discrepancies to a realistic scenario - which may or may not matter since this is more-or-less, fantasy. A book that could've done an excellent job at exploiting the fears of most American's after terrorist attacks and random shooting, simply exploited the writer's weaknesses.
Pros: the author did a great job at character-building and expressing the characters emotional, mental, and physical distress; the author wrote the experience in a way that allowed you to follow the questions each character had (who, what, when, [definitely] why, and how); the book was suspenseful enough and let me with enough curiosity that I wanted to finish it (see "a series should...").
Cons: the author clearly has never researched panic in an enclosed facility; the author is far from a politician, nor has she ever met a politician; the story line confused logic with panic. Writing from the perspective of a character, narrating four different characters as chapter headings grows confusing, even for someone who reads frequently because the art of I, we, us, etc., can be intertwined with the other characters' stories if not done well (and this wasn't done well).
A series should always stand alone - I should be able to read the first book and have enough closure that I don't have to read ahead to second book in the series (but the idea of course is that I will). Unfortunately, this was the first book in a series, and the end of the book was left without any resolve, any conclusion, and definitely no closure. I was so disappointed with the book as a whole, and the conclusion of the book, that I will not be reading into books two and three.
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