Just Fantastic

5 out of 5 stars

I love when you can’t tell that two authors worked together on a book.  Smith and Melchiorri’s stories blended perfectly in this and I wouldn’t have known which author wrote which part.

Thankfully the extreme descriptions of clicking (needed and necessary in the other books, just grosses me out to no end) are slightly less in this book – but it is replaced with fantastically thought out Variants that had me scratching my head trying to figure out what was going to happen throughout the book.

Extinction Shadow is one of those books you put on and the hours just fade away.  I was trying to get to 50% (from around 45 or so – and next thing I knew I was much further than 50%. I looked at the clock and it was almost 2am.  I couldn’t believe that the time got away from me, but the storytelling is so good that it just went by like nothing was happening.

The hardest (read hardest, not worst) part of Shadow was trying to remember that it wasn’t a Hell Divers book.  Smith decided to go with Bray instead of Pinchot for the narration and personally, I’m glad.  I don’t hate Pinchot’s narration, but Bray has a cult following that will definitely help with a book like this.  The only thing that made it harder where some of the characters had the same names as Hell Divers characters.  I want to say there was a Tim or Timmy in this, along with at least one other.  It was one of those “fun” challenges.  Like having so much money you don’t know what to spend it on.

Overall, a fantastic story that I flew through.  I really appreciate the introduction at the beginning of the book (easily skippable if you’ve read every book in the original series).  I’d only read about half of them, so I was familiar with some of the settings and definitely familiar with the Variants – but everything other than that was lost to me. Even if I’d read them all, I think I would have appreciate the quick reminder.

Book Description:

Extinction Shadow by Anthony J. Melchiorri, Nicholas Sansbury Smith
Narrator: R.C. Bray
Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
Series: Extinction Cycle: Dark Age #1
Published by Blue Heron Audio on August 13th 2019
Genres: Post-Apocalyptic
Also by this author: Extinction Inferno, Extinction Ashes, Wild Fire (New Frontier #1), Extinction Horizon, Extinction Edge, The Extinction Cycle, Extinction Age
Also in this series: Extinction Inferno, Extinction Ashes

Brian
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