I bought this book (the Kindle e-book edition) because I'm a lemming, sort of.
Amazon strongly recommended it, so it caught my attention. I wasn't familiar with Victor Gischler, but Amazon has recommended some fine books to me in the past. So what the heck!
Just like I don't like to start a book in the middle, I don't like reading a new (to me) author's work without starting at the beginning. So I mentally dog-eared this recommendation and started with Gischler's first book,
Gun Monkeys. I could tell before I was even half way through
Gun Monkeys that I was an instant Gischler fan. So I quickly bought the Kindle versions of the rest of his books (
The Pistol Poets,
Suicide Squeeze,
Shotgun Opera, and of course
Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse: A Novel) so I could read them one after another, just like the chain smoking characters in his other books.
It took me about a month to get through his first four books. They were all good reads, so I didn't want to rush too quickly.
My favorite thing about Go-Go girls was how different it was from the rest of his stories: the settings, the characters, the situation, and the conflicts were all unique to this book. I wouldn't say these aspects were "better" or "worse" than his other books, but they were dissimilar enough that I didn't feel like this was just a retread version of his previous novels.
The set up for the apocalypse was eerily believable. The west coast "big one" was a little bit farfetched to me, but that's only because I live in So Cal and am in total denial of the next big quake (the big quakes in '71 and '94 didn't kill me, so why should the next one?). The chain of events that the big quake set off were totally believable. One thing led to another, and then the world was kaput.
I could totally relate to the protagonist's predicament too. Without going into any details, he missed the nitty-gritty experience of the first years of the post-apocalypse. He seemed to be playing catch up through the rest of the story. He only survived due to his good luck and resolve.
I can only hope that if I live long enough to see the world that he describes, that the JD distillery survives intact and is available as cheaply as it is in Gischler's world. I suppose a regular supply of Diet Coke would be too much to ask for, but I'd find a way to adapt.
So out of a possible five stars I'm definitely giving it a five. If the scale were 1-10, I'd probably give it a nine. Then again, if it were 1-100, I'd give it a 93. So it's no stretch to round up to five.
Now my only disappointment is that I've consumed all of Gischler's books and will have to wait a while for the next one.
