Customer Reviews

Fire-us #3: The Kiln

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Is anyone but me finding this Zimmerman person annoying? I mean, I appreciate being informed of the doings of the Left and Right wings, but this is a childrens book, for God's sake!
Anyway, this thrilling final chapter will keep you glue to the book. The children, now with Cory, the girl from the Keepers, are continuing their quest to find President, the only person who might be able to help them. Unfortunately, they have reason believe her is being held against his will by the Keepers at Pisgah Island, so the older kids, Mommy, Teacher, Hunter, Cory, and a mentally deteriorating Angerman, set out to rescue him, leaving the little ones in the care of an all-female retirement community they find at the beginning of the book. What they find is more terrible than anything they've seen along the way.
This concluding book held me too my seat until the very end. The construction of the novel, as we see the points of view of all the oldest children, as well as the twists and turns along the way make for a fantastic literary journey. If I may quote my favorite line from the book (I hope without giving too much away), "It's all rght, I get it. Gun breaks glass, virus kills all, ergo no bang-bang."
A real page-turner: 5 stars.

This book was such a flimsy conclusion to what otherwise could have been a decent series.

I was really intrigued with the building of the characters in the first two books. I was excited about the third to see how the authors brought it all together, however it just didn't happen. I felt cheated by the introduction of the grannies in the retirement home. It was very insulting to my intelligence. After all, if women who had gone through menopause were immune to the virus, wouldn't their town in Florida be swarming with helpful grannies wanting to care for orphaned children? After all, within a one block radius of my own home, I can think of 6 people who would be immune to the virus.

I also was disappointed with the weak development of the president and his followers from the shopping mall. He was such a flat and predictable villian as were his minnions. All in all, this series could have really been interesting and exciting, but the authors were either too lazy or uncreative to bring all the elements together without cheating me.

Here's the climax. The chilling conclusion. The scary exciting end of these series. It will disturb you, alarm you, and again, with these themes, it might be a bit too disturbing for younger audiences.

This book is fantastic! It will make you angry in bits, but all through it you'll cheer these characters on.

This book was an excellent end to the Fire-us trilogy. If you want to read good fiction, read this series.
I read some parts in this book over and over again, and I still feel like I have to read it all over again because I missed so much (I'm a careful reader, so I couldn't miss that much). Still, if you want good science fiction, read this book!!!

The Fire-Us trilogy is an entertaining post-apocalyptic thriller for those who are too young to remember the fears of nuclear annihilation that came to an end in the 1990's.

Unfortunately, in the final installment, the authors' political biases become all to clear.

For adult readers, this trilogy is an example of the kinds of evil allegations that our currend political Left is willing to spread about conservatives. If a conservative writer were to say such things about liberals he or she would be called a witch hunter, a McCarthyite, or worse. But so be it. The tale itself is entertaining enough on its own merits.

THE KILN, opens with Teacher and Cory following the clues in the Book. They find the rest safe at a retirement home full of old ladies. One of them, the home's physician, confirms that Fire-Us had indeed been a virus. But it had killed only those whose bodies were producing sexual hormones. Thus it killed all men, and all women between puberty and menopause. That was how the old women survived. The men at the retirement home died, but the women survived.

Angerman begins to behave more and more insanely, and one of the women mysteriously addresses him as David. We learn that the last President had a name that rhymes with the name of a man who actually was regarded as a Presidential contender during the 1990's (in our "real" world). He was last seen at Pisgah Island, further up the road. The older children leave the younger ones with the old women at The Woods retirement home and take a solar-powered golf cart up the road to Pisgah.

There the children learn who the Keepers really are, and the role of President in the murder of the billions of people who had formerly inhabited the planet. It seems that President (who had first been elected in 2000) had been disappointed that the apocalyptic predictions for that hear had not come to pass. Angerman surprisingly regains his sanity. We learn the nature of the Testing of the infants born to the brides of the Supreme Leader, which has grown more and more ominous.

This author is far from surprised that liberals (such as the credentials of Jennifer Armstrong and Nancy Butcher) would be just as prone to belief in monstrous conspiracy theories as the Right has long been reputed to be. That is common knowledge. What is intriguing is that these two women would have attained a degree of respectability unheard of for conservative writers of similar stature. On the right, such conspiracies would be called alarmism. Why should that not be the case here?