Reviewed by: BigAl
Genre: Satire
Approximate word count: 80-85,000 words
Availability
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on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or
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Author:
Novelist
John Rachel is an ex-patriot American, who currently lives in Japan. He has
three other books available.
For more,
visit his website.
Description:
“Collapse,
chaos, confusion, rioting, looting.
And that's
the good news!
America is
coming apart and the President can do nothing to stop it.
But
23-year-old Noah Tass has his own problems. Stuck his entire life in the
hayseed capital of the Bible Belt after his father abandoned him 18 years ago,
he has no future, all his friends are losers, his job is a dead end, his mother
is stark raving mad, and his sister is a meth head stripper.”
Appraisal:
Although
never explicitly stated, Blinders Keepers
is set in contemporary times, call it the very near future. It’s satirical and
definitely has its moments. For example, the sitting President of the US can
string together clichés while saying nothing as well as any politician you’ve
ever seen. Or the description of an odor as “unlike anything Noah had ever encountered,
having never exhumed a person from a grave or stuck his head inside the bloated
anus of a cow that had been rotting in the sun for several weeks.”
However, it
also has some issues. A fair number of errors that were not caught in proofreading
is one. Mysterious happenings around the country and massive social changes
occurring in a short amount of time that stretched my ability to suspend
disbelief without more explanation or justification for how they were
happening. Eventually I managed to just take it on faith and go with the story,
but it was a struggle to get there. There were minor issues as well including
stating that it was “supposed to be impossible” to determine your approximate
location if you visited a website. This is actually fairly trivial and has been
for some time. Or the protagonist knowing that something was fake with no way
for him to have figured that out. However, by its nature, I think satire gets
more leeway than most genres in straying from reality and by the last half of
the book I was engrossed in Noah’s adventure in spite of the flaws.
FYI:
Adult
language and mild adult situations.
Format/Typo Issues:
A large
number of copy editing and proofing misses.
Rating: *** Three stars
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