Title: Insurgent: Book 2 of America’s
Future
Author: Charles Sheehan-Miles
Genre: alternate history, thriller
Price: $17.95 (paperback) / $4.99
(Kindle
Publisher: Cincinnatus Press
ISBN: 978-0979411496
Point of Sale: Amazon
Reviewed by: Chris Gerrib
This
blog (or at least this writer at this blog) has been a fan of Charles
Sheehan-Miles since I devoured and loved his novel Republic (see my review).
So, when I heard that he’d (finally!) released a sequel to that book,
called Insurgent, I jumped at the
chance to buy and read it.
I think
the best way to summarize the book is to quote the description from the Amazon
page:
Three months after the end of the West Virginia civil war, Valerie
Murphy faces her worst fears as the violence escalates. Former Congressman Al
Clark, now Governor of the bankrupt state, must quell an insurgency even as he
struggles to put the state back together.
In a small town south of Charleston, West Virginia, Corporal Jim
Turville faces combat, love and fear in a conflict which grows increasingly
dangerous with every day.
As implied by the summary above, the book
does start immediately after the events of Republic,
but I think that enough of what happened in the previous book is explained in Insurgent to allow people to catch
up. Sheehan-Miles’ view of a future
America is not a pretty one, and can be charitably described as corporations
and security theater run amuck.
Sheehan-Miles draws heavily on the events
of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and paints an unstinting picture of
insurgency. It’s a book where in one
chapter rooting for troops under fire and in the next one mourning the death of
an innocent civilian killed by those same troops because her house was in the
line of fire.
Republic started with a terrorist attack
in Washington, DC. In Insurgent, we
start to see who (apparently) caused or at least enabled that attack, and let’s
just say it’s not who you’d expect.
Sheehan-Miles has little sympathy for extremists of any stripe, and he’s
identified a group of extremists to play the “big bad” in this story that may
surprise some people.
Insurgent is a gripping, exciting and
well-written book, and highly recommended.
9/10
No comments:
Post a Comment