Looking For a Good Book

Emily and Sam are scientists, currently in the wilderness, with guide Bash leading them through remote areas that they want to study. They encounter eighteen year old Hazel and her younger brother, Caleb, who don’t seem at all prepared for walking in the remote woodlands.

At about the same time that they meet the young siblings, Emily, Sam, and Bash make a very startling discovery – all the local water – from streams to ponds – are poisoned. Some strange, killer algae has appeared in the water and it’s killing everything that drinks it. Suddenly this hike in the wilderness has turned into a fight for survival!

The adult trio convince the siblings to stay with them so that they can look for water to survive and the try to get more information from the odd youngsters. It turns out that Hazel and Caleb have just run away from a camp of cultists that was planning to marry Hazel to an older man and send Caleb away to live with a different family. But Hazel refuses to let anyone separate her from Caleb. But running away from cultists poses another problem for the three adults as they don’t know who might be searching for them.

An encounter with a group of National Guardists, who, by their willingness to take anything they want, confirm Bash’s worsts fears – this lack of water is wide-spread and people are now forming groups to protect themselves. And even worse news comes when they learn (through other hikers) that the National Guard have teamed up with the cultists (because the cultists have a safe well of drinking water).

A search for the runaway kids and an all-out war for water puts Bash (who has taken on the roll of protector) in the crosshairs of too many dangerous men.

This book was so very nearly a DNF for me. And I’ve only once ever had a DNF book.

The book, which sits at nearly 1000 pages, is broken down into three parts which equates to three decent-length books and in the reading, these do break down, plot-wise, into three separate stories. Authors Riley miller & Grace Hamilton do make this quite seamless and into one very long novel.

My near-DNF came early in the book, maybe half way through the first part. While it’s understandable that Hazel and Caleb would be pretty clueless in just about everything, given that they were raised very sheltered in a cult, our adult characters were not only absolutely brilliant in absolutely every single subject, they were CONSTANTLY explaining and teaching and and providing lessons. It was exhausting and annoying. I truly was going to quit because of this. I didn’t think I could take another 800 pages of this kind of dialog.

I stuck with it because I checked the Goodreads page and the ratings were generally high so I figured it must get better (or the authors have a lot of friends). Humorously enough, even the authors must have caught on to what was happening and, instead of rewriting, had Hazel comment “Does he always have to be teaching?” shortly after I was about to give up. (Chapter Five was the most offensive in this manner.)

The book does get better with more excitement and energy and less didacticism, but there are things that just keep this from being a book that’s easy to recommend. Things like someone saying “be careful not to touch anything that feels damp”. Really? Read that slowly and think about it for a second. And that Pollyanna go-get-’em attitude when someone says

But maybe the strangest part of this book is that from the moment we meet Hazel and Caleb, we’re told that the cult leader (of course they don’t use the term cult) is Saul and how he’s going to track them down until they are returned. But we don’t meet Saul, until 2/3 of the way through the book. It definitely gives off the vibe that this was decided to be the final book’s story arc even though he didn’t play much part in the book other than as a faceless figure.

Despite being intelligent – enough to constantly be teaching and knowing about everything, the people in this book make a lot of bad decisions, over and over – you know, like the people who decide to hide from the serial killer in the cemetery kind of decisions.

The book is told from different POVs – each character, even our bad guys, get chapters for their insight. This shifting POV did not bother me, in fact it was used well.

Overall, while it got better and the ending was quite exciting, I can’t recommend this. If you absolutely love dystopian type fiction and just can’t get enough, then give this a shot. It’s definitely got those vibes. But for most of us…? I think not.

Looking for a good book? The 3-in-1 dystopian tome, Toxic Tides, by Riley Miller and Grace Hamilton goes on much too long. The interesting and exciting parts of the book – and there are some – are overshadowed by the extraneous detail.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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Toxic Tides

author: Riley Miller & Grace Hamilton

publisher: Independently Published

ISBN: 9798307994870

Kindle Edition, 995 pages