Books I've Read: After the Lights Go Out

I' back from my holiday and have done a lot of reading since the weather was not exactly kind to us for a summer beach vacation...  So expect plenty of book reviews to come!

This was a really interesting story about a subject I know very little about: doomsday preppers.  Set in a small town in rural Australia, the book fascinated me from the very beginning.  The psychology of these people fascinates me almost as much as that of people who join cults!

Pru is 17 and lives in this small community with just her father and her twin sisters.  Their father moved them to this community after their mother left them in Melbourne, probably because of their father's increasingly paranoid thinking.  Out in the country, her has the space to act on this paranoia and the family is now prepared for any disaster - nuclear war, earthquake, pandemic, or even a zombie apocalypse.

To keep them on their toes, regular drills are staged to ensure each family member knows exactly where and what they need to do to get to their bunker with everything they need to survive.

One day while their father is away working at the mine, the lights go out.  Everywhere. All communications cease and no one knows why.  In town, things quickly descend into chaos as supplies run out and there is no way to contact anyone for medical help.  Pru's family have everything they need in their bunker and decide to keep this a secret from the rest of the town.  Their father has always drilled into them that family comes first.

But when their father fails to reappear and survival becomes paramount, Pru begins to question whether his rules should still apply.

I really enjoyed this story.  I'm not sure the science behind the actual doomsday event is realistic, but it worked in terms of the story, so I'm not going to dig too deep.  I was far more interested in the various ways people reacted to it and to the three sisters who mysteriously had the most knowledge of how to survive an event like this.

I feel like this story only worked because of its remote location.  In a city, things would have been very different and the way people reacted to the doomsday event and to everything that happened afterward would have been far more dangerous and chaotic.  Keeping the cast of characters small and the likelihood of any strangers showing up to disrupt them low was beneficial to the story being told and allowed us to really get to know them and their motivations.

So if, like me, you're interested in finding out ore about what motivates people to be doomsday preppers and how people really might react in this type of scenario, this book might be for you.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

Seventeen-year-old Pru Palmer lives with her twin sisters, Grace and Blythe, and their father, Rick, on the outskirts of an isolated mining community. The Palmers are doomsday preppers. They have a bunker filled with non-perishable food and a year's worth of water. Each of the girls has a 'bug out bag', packed with water purification tablets, protein bars, paracord bracelets and epipens for Pru's anaphylaxis.

One day while Rick is at the mine, the power goes out. At the Palmers' house, and in the town. No one knows why. All communication is cut. It doesn't take long for everything to unravel. In town, supplies run out and people get desperate. The sisters decide to keep their bunker a secret. The world is different; the rules are different. Survival is everything, and family comes first.