Apocalypse Parenting is just flat out fun. You should read it. Buy your copy at this link.
I’m a judge in the 3rd annual Self Published Science Fiction Contest, part of team Tar Vol On, and each member of the team was assigned a certain number of books to read. People in SPSFC use a 10-point rating system, which I’ll use internally, but I don’t think I’ll post those scores publicly. Any internal score that I use in judging SPSFC3 will be entirely unrelated to the number of stars on Amazon, because I’m a super wimpy Amazon reviewer and I don’t post a review there unless I can, in good conscience, give it four or five stars.
Alright, Caveats aside, let’s dive in to this awesome book!
Apocalypse Parenting: Time to Play (Book 1 in a series) is from a genre called “LitRPG,” of which I had read nothing before this. Basically, in this genre, the story is told from the point of view of a character in a video game. In the case of this book, aliens turn all of human existence into a life and death video game for their amusement, and the characters must survive the introduction of monsters, gain experience, learn new powers, etc. like a game.
My first instinct was suspicion of the premise. It seemed kind of silly. But the book just plunges in without feeling any obligation to explain it, and I thought that method really succeeded in getting me to suspend disbelief. It only took a page or two before I was immersed in a world where characters had to pick starting abilities and start fighting creatures in their front yard.
The series gets its title from the fact that the main character is the mother of three. Her husband was off on a business trip when the aliens turned the earth into a video game, so we meet her trying to handle three kids alone in the middle of the apocalypse.
Her name is Meghan Moretti and she carries this entire show. She’s so authentically believable that she just instantly sells the reader all the crazy stuff that happens to her and her family.
Another element that really worked is the lighthearted element of whimsy that comes with this book. Any time you’re trying to corral three kids, chaos is going to ensue, and these kids give the new monsters hilarious names, accidentally animate their stuffed animals from not understanding abilities, and ride around in a wagon turned into a tank, which the kids want to call “Wank” but our MC insists on naming “Tagon.”
This lighthearted fun eases the threshold for willing suspension of disbelief, making it easier to accept the premise, and the harried “single” (for purposes of this story) mom MC trying to balance keeping her kids out of trouble with leveling up as a video game character simply made me smile through the whole thing.
I caught a couple (literally two) typos, and I thought the plot structure could have been better, but overall I loved this book.
A note about the cover: people in book marketing say that your cover makes a promise to your reader about what they can expect if they read it. I have never seen a more accurate promise made by a book cover. This cover IS the first 20% of this book.
I will advocate among my team for Apocalypse Parenting to advance in the contest, and I’ll probably even buy the sequel.
Check out Apocalypse Parenting today!
If you like science fiction, you can check my own Sci-Fi out at www.ExileWar.com.