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Danielle Kidnapped: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Ice Age
Danielle Kidnapped is a new survival novel written by John Silveira, senior editor of Backwoods Home Magazine.
Because of Silveira’s significant experience as a writer, this is a well written novel. Many survival novels floating around are reduced to a dream list of gear and resources to have. There’s a perfect, almost godlike protagonist, and the book becomes a report of how everything pretty much goes along as planned.
In this case extreme cold weather has marked the begging of a new ice age. Crops have failed and caused a widespread socioeconomic collapse. Food has become very scarce and millions escape the colder northern US states looking for warmer weather down south.
Sixteen year old Danielle is escaping to the southern states with her family when they are attacked by a gang that prays on refugees. After being robbed, her parents and brother are left to die at the side of the frozen road. She along with her baby sister are taken captive by the ruthless gang and her nightmare beings. The beginning of the book is pretty dark and grim. After being abused by her captors Danielle is just another mouth to feed, so the future doesn’t look very good for her and her baby sister.
Another character is soon introduced. He’s more of a classic survivalist type, and while not unrealistically well prepared, he does have previous skills and knowledge that allow him to fare better after disaster strikes. In spite of this, he’s far from perfect and does have his own demons to deal with. These two characters present a nice contrast between someone that is better prepared, also more experienced, and someone that is basically a typical teenager with a strong will to survive and keep her baby sister alive.
I definitely recommend Danielle Kidnapped. I read it all the same day I got it, which I believe says a lot of how it keeps you turning pages wondering what will happen next. It is a trilogy, so there’s two more books coming up. In my opinion, its there with some genre classics like Matt Bracken’s Enemies trilogy and Castigo Cay David Crawford’s Lights Out. All of them highly recommended.
Danielle Kidnapped is available on Amazon both on paperback and kindle.
FerFAL
5 comments:
"Last Light" and its sequel "Afterlight" by Alex Scarrow are really good books. So is Terry Nation's "Survivors".
/Max
My interest was piqued until you compared it to Crawford's "Lights Out". Everything you claimed that makes survival fiction bad was present in LO. I saw it described on Amazon as "Brady Bunch Apocalypse", if you know what that references. So bad I couldn't finish. Boss was "secret survivalist" (but racist!), final pay in silver dimes, etc, what crap it was.
I hope this book is SERIOUSLY better...
That's interesting that the author chose to set the book in an ice age. The last story I recall with that setting was the sci-fi novel "Fallen Angels" by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes.
I too find myself hoping that this will be more realistic than most survival fiction.
+1 for "The Survivors" by Terry Nation, quite depressing though. Also up there (at least on the downer scale) are "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy and "The Death of Grass" by John Christopher.
I just finished "Danielle Kidnapped" last night. I really enjoyed it. The story was cohesive, the characters interesting, and the story reasonably credible. And I even learned a few new things.
There were a few instances where the grammar/editing were spotty (e.g. they're/their errors), but I've come to expect that from self-published e-books.
The author mentions that this is the first of a planned trilogy - and I liked the first book enough to want to buy the next 2.
Thanks for the recommendation!
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