To Sail a Darkling sea

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Call Number: Science Fiction
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Science Fiction	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"With human civilization annihilated by a biological zombie plague, a rag tag fleet of yachts and freighters known as Wolf Squadron scours the Atlantic, searching for survivors. Within every abandoned liner and carrier lurks a potential horde of zombies but also holds the flickering hope of survivors. Now Wolf Squadron must clear the assault carrier USS Iwo Jima of infected before the trapped Marines and sailors succumb to starvation"-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Still a good read in the series submitted by hathaway1066 on July 19, 2017, 7:18am What I liked about the series in the first book is still going strong in this, the second book in the 'Black Tide Rising' series. It's fun to see how survivors pull together in the wake of a plague that burns through society and leaves 1 in thousand (or so) as a survivor, with most of the rest turned into rabid zombies. Seeing how the survivors put-together a plan to (literally) salvage their way to some sort of renewal of civilization is why I kept reading. That, and the enjoyable bits of dialogue and gritty characters.

There are a few things I wish I didn't have to read as much about, or that could have been dialed back a bit:
--repeated, detailed discussion of different types of guns and ammo,
--occasional jabs at political left-ish ideas and the 'snowflake' mentality, and
--occasional, icky depiction of the 13 and 15 yr old main character sisters as hotties along with
--an assumption that if trapped in a lifeboat/cruise ship compartment for weeks/months, all women survivors would (due to boredom and/or an end of the world scenario driven instinct) eventually get it on with whichever men were around, and emerge more or less happily pregnant.

To have one of those 'women' be 12 years old and to go to rather extreme lengths to avoid her having had sex with the 17 yr old boy on her lifeboat, but to then say that, for survival reasons, they HAD to start having sex (so her/the baby's chances of surviving the delivery could be nudged up a bit) was just a few steps too far in a couple of wrong directions for me. It felt like reading Robert Heinlein in his later years, when he would often put his male protagonists in a harem-type setting and elaborately explain/defend that arrangement against straw-man arguments. But in this case there are underage girls involved. Yuck.

However, the author manages to stay on the right side of 'the line' when it comes to such things, by condemning and giving drawn-out explications for such instances: if someone comments on the 13 yr old being hot, someone else immediately shuts that down, and so on. And those moments are rare and scattered though a larger plot. So the book is readable. I just wish I didn't have to read past such to get from one thrill-ride moment to the next.