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41 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Home spun post apocolypse survival!, March 3, 2008
I am a sucker for a good post apocolypse novel, and this more than satisfied my need for a story of survival against the odds. This is not a new novel as such - the author tells us in the introduction that it was written in the 80s, at the tail end of the cold war, when perhaps global nuclear anihilation was possible (and we do have to ask ourselves has this threat passed us by?), but it is still a fresh and intelligent novel nonetheless.
The plot is simple enough - a family who has decided to return to their farming roots are relatively untouched by the problems of global destruction, and are well placed to continue with the sort of down-to-earth pragmatism that you would expect from such practical folk. They form a small community with other locals they have rescued, particularly the elderly and the young - with the former providing many useful skills and knowledge that had been for the most part lost to the modern world. They survive very nicely, fighting off the occasional violent raids of a group of people who had lived ostracised from society prior to the bombs, and who raid causing indiscriminate death and destruction.
This is an entertaining and engaging novel for the genre; if I give it 4 stars instead of 5, it is because the "home spun" style of storytelling means that we don't get any insight into what has happened outside of the small community, nor any into what is driving the evil doers who rampage without seeming thought or logic.
However, it is very entertaining and well written, and I recommend it not just for fans of the genre, but for those who enjoy a tale which celebrates skills and community perhaps now gone.
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55 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
If you're looking for a politically correct SHTF book, this is the one for you., August 27, 2010
Let me give it to you straight, this is one of THE worst SHTF books I have ever read. In fact the only thing good about this book that I can actually think of to say is that at least the author can actually spell and use punctuation correctly and there aren't a whole bunch of typos. It's all downhill from there. The main characters are a man and a woman who grew up on adjoining farms and who then fell in love and married. Like many farm kids they move away from their rural family farms to try their hand at city life in Houston and they have two kids along the way. Basically life in the city is too hectic for them, they're unhappy there and they decide to move back to the family farm (just in time it turns out). At any rate once they're back on the farm their family life this time around before the 'World Ends' is so idyllic that once the power goes out and the mail stops they don't even bother to go into town to find out what's going on. In fact they wait a week before they go into town to visit one of their mothers only to find out that TS has HTF and that many cities in the US have been nuked. Once they find out this what do they do??? Collect Grandma and her useful belongings and head out of town towards home to fortify their house? Go by the houses of local friends to try and get a survival group together? No, they collect the extra food grandma has around the house and the husband in the story goes to deliver it to the local shelter that the city has going for people that were homeless, in the hospital or that were in the local nursing home. Instead of dumping off the food like he was supposed to the husband returns to Grandma's house with a bunch of complete strangers who are all amazingly skilled in different ways. They also all might as well be from the United Nations because they're all as ethnically diverse as humanly possible and they invite them all to live on their farm as one big happy family. Yeah, right. =) If you think that's unlikely as hell wait 'til you really get into the middle and towards the end of it. This book is filled full of all kinds of instances like this where the characters do the politically correct thing and perform extremely unlikely acts of kindness (or stupidity, whichever way you look on it) which would never happen in real life. Plus you can definitely tell where this person's political lie. It's almost as if some Anarchist 'Peace Punk' got ahold of a survival manual somewhere and decided to write down chapter and verse how they think that society SHOULD go rather than what's most likely to play out if the bombs were to fall and society as we know it would cease to end. I'm sorry.....but should chaos really reign over the land you're going to see scenes from Beruit, Belfast, Chechnya, Sarajevo replayed all over this country. People aren't going to come together from diverse backgrounds to form some group out of nowhere. It's just not realistic. When L.A. exploded into violence in April of 1992 was Reginald Denny asked to join the Eight Tray Gangster Crips when he rolled through Florence and Normandie? No, he got hauled out of his car and had the crap beat out of him because he wasn't like the people that lived in that area. All pretty unlikely and unrealistic stuff in this book. Also the characters of this book are also as flat and as uninteresting as a Kansas prairie. BTW - To give you an idea of how stupidly politically correct the author is the 'Raiders' of this book are a bunch of Redneck Southern Women who kill all the male children that are born to the various women (who are knocked up by strangers or moonshiners). Their children are so feral that they know how to use a pistol, but not know how to speak in complete sentences. Yeah....like I said, pretty stupid. Unless you just HAVE TO have every SHTF/Post-Apocalyptic book out there don't bother with this one.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not the best "end of the world" book I've ever read..., July 1, 2010
"The World Ends in Hickory Hollow" is billed as a "novel in the style of George R. Stewart's Earth Abides" on the cover. Being a fan of end-of-the-world stories, and of "Earth Abides", I decided to give it a try. I put it on my Christmas list last year, then put it on my "to read" pile shortly thereafter. I finally got around to it last week and, in many ways, I wish I had kept it on the pile instead.
"The World Ends in Hickory Hollow" follows the residents of Hickory Hollow, TX after a nuclear war wipes out most of the world. Through a fortuitous act of fate, most of the fallout missed their little town and it survived. As the residents come to terms with the disaster, they are forced to rely on themselves to survive - growing their own food, making their own clothes, etc. The modern world is all but gone.
Reading that back - it sounds like a story I would really like. I wish that it were. For me, most good end-of-the-world stories involve the world ending in the story with a bang; not always - but I do like to see a little carnage, a little action, a little something impactful in my apocalyptic fiction. In "Hickory Hollow", the world ends with a whimper. It ends with the power going out on a family farm. The family is just fine - in fact, they don't even learn of the nuclear exchange until ten days later when they head in to town for groceries. The power is out, world is over.
What follows is more a discussion about the day-to-day existence of the family and the friends and neighbors that they take in. There is a lot of talk about getting back to the old ways and living off of the land. That's fine - and can be a part of any good story about the apocalypse. What was missing for me was any real drama or conflict. Yes, there were some "bad folks" that caused trouble and had to be dealt with - but that conflict never really felt central to the story. It almost felt like an add-on, just to be able to say that there was a conflict to resolve. It was not very satisfying, nor was it particularly suspenseful or engaging in the way it was resolved.
All in all, "Hickory Hollow" was not a bad book - it just wasn't a good book. It didn't really go anywhere, didn't emotionally invest me in the characters, and I found myself looking forward to being finished with it. Thankfully, it was a short book. I did learn one valuable lesson, however, about what it will take to survive the end of the world. The main protagonist in the story described her family as such:
"Now we both knew farming the way you know it only if you grew up working on one. We were both good carpenters, plumbers, herdsmen, horticulturists, loggers, metalworkers, managers, mechanics...in short, typical farmers."
That's all it takes? A little of this, a little of that - who knew it was that simple to survive the end of the world? I'm screwed.
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