Last Light by Terri Blackstock

I read this novel for my book club, and while it is a work of fiction, it makes for a good contrast with the previous book that I reviewed. In it, the world is much simpler and black and white. For example, the drinking of alcoholic beverages is only associated with disreputable characters, guns are good, it's OK to mess up the police's efforts in a criminal investigation if you're a good person who's really upset, and so on.

The premise of the book is a largely unexplained outage to just about anything electrical. Later, this is narrowed down to an unexplained worldwide failure related to semiconductors. Some electrical items, like simple battery-powered flashlights still work. While I felt the technical details were somewhat lacking, some of the characters feel it was a direct Act of God which (just for starters) caused airliners to fall from the sky on page 2, sending all aboard to fiery deaths.

I think the duration of the book is about the first month after the outage. Another thing that wasn't clear to me was the post-outage economy. Money seemed important to everyone, but it wasn't clear that there was anything to buy. Some rudimentary law enforcement is in place, but as far as I can tell, the police was just about the only part of the economy that was functioning. It wasn't clear how the police got paid, or in what.

The book is the story of how the Branning family from the Birmingham, Alabama area deals with the crisis. The family is well-off. Father Doug is a middle-aged stockbroker; mother Kay is a stay-at-home mother, and they have 4 children, aged between around 22 and 10. As you would expect, they are ill-prepared to deal with such a catastrophe. In part, the book is an interesting thought-experiment looking at what would happen should we lose our technology. As you would guess, a stockbroker and a well-off housewife don't exactly have the skills to make it in a pre-electrical world. And neither does most of society.

The book would be somewhat interesting if it focused on just dealing with the outage. But one area where the book fails for me is when it adds a neighbourhood murder ("Plot Device #2") to this plot. For a while, at least, the book becomes a murder mystery, with the characters trying to track down the killer.

I'm hesitant to give such a book a low rating. Obviously, the author tried hard. Also, a friend who knows a lot more about literature than I do said he loved it. Virtually all of the reviews on Amazon say it's good. But I found the characters to be unrealistically one-dimensional. When the whiney-loser adult daughter finally gets into a bit of trouble, instead of having sympathy, I thought that it was about time she was getting what she deserved. Maybe my next comment is obvious, or maybe it's insulting, but this isn't serious literature. I'm not sure if it's meant to be. It reminds me of the sort of thing that you might pick up at an airport bookstore, (it is easy reading), pass some time with it on a flight, and then throw it away when you land. Two stars out of five.