Breakers (Book 1)

Breakers started off interesting, but as I read more, I found it less so. It’s not a story that goes downhill, in my opinion, but it’s definitely something I felt had no real goal. It was like the characters had no idea what to do, and they just went with the first idea that came to mind, no matter how far fetched the idea was. In the end, there was no real resolution. At least, not to me.The characters in Breakers were everyday people, nothing spectacular or supernatural about them. They could be a neighbor, a friend, even family. But the choices they made left me scratching my head, even though the reasoning was presented at times. For instance, one of the main characters wanted to walk from New York City to someplace in California that his girlfriend planned on moving to, but I still didn’t get it. He made it known why, but he could have done what he wanted in NYC without walking across the United States. And there were two other main characters making choices that didn’t make a lick of sense also. They trusted a complete stranger right away after shooting and killing the first stranger they rescued? And the second stranger came out of nowhere, and he had a gun. They just had a quick minute conversation, gave this brand new guy the bike meant for the first stranger and let him ride along. Yeah, okay, why were they still trusting people?The story overall was well written, but the voices for many of the characters were the same. They had the same smart-type replies. No one really stood out as different in that aspect. And when it came to the description of the characters, I really had a hard time trying to picture them despite many instances of descriptions in the story, but I didn’t dwell on that too much.Breakers was as a whole enjoyable, and it kept my attention. I won’t be reading the rest of the series, but I’m glad I took the time out to read this one.

Achoo! Hope that isn't the flu that you have... if so, I expect you will be dead soon... at least that would be the case in "Breakers"...The Breakers is a story of a massive flu virus that kills off most of the population of the world. It has two separate story lines - Walt, a man from New York, and Mia and Raymond, a couple from LA.Walt is madly in love with Vanessa, a model/actress, and lives in New York. He finds a "Dear John" letter that states that she is going to break up with him and he is destroyed by the thought. He tried to find ways to change her mind or avoid her giving it to him since she doesn't know that he has seen it. One way that he comes up with is to pretend to be ill. This actually works very well since she lovingly takes care of him and he feels he has bought more time to change her mind as she is his entire world. Very ironic of course because she then gets sick with the flu and isn't faking and soon dies.Walt then decides that he is going to walk to LA because Vanessa's dream was always to move to LA and Walt brushed her off whenever she brought it up. He doesn't expect to live through the trip - after all, it is over 3000 miles and he is not going to take a car even though they are readily available. The situation in NY is chaos - dead bodies everywhere, rats, soldiers, looting. Walt has to experience extreme situations before he is able to start his journey.Raymond and Mia's story is completely different. They had moved to California when Raymond had inherited his Mom's house and expected to be able to find jobs and have a great life. Instead, Raymond can't find work, they are running out of money, and he is scrambling for a job. The flu doesn't affect their life as much where they live. While they do have some scary experiences at first, it actually seems rather calm and they are happier than they have been in a long time.Then, the aliens come (not a spoiler alert - the author refers to the "crab like monstrosity" that Walt runs into and the colonists in his book description). The story lines meet up together when the survivors have to fight to take Earth back from the aliens.I thought it was a good book - enjoyed the "journey stories" of both Walt and Raymond and Mia the best. The secondary characters that they meet for the alien portion were interesting and there were some good twists. Walt had some life experiences from his family business that I wasn't expecting and was pretty cool when it came to fighting - something new which is always good to read. I would buy other books from this author..

I stumbled across this book while playing around and window shopping. I almost didn't buy it because it was both a biological apocalypse and an alien invasion but in the end, that's also what got me to buy it. This is a sub-genre mashup I hadn't read before and felt it needed to be tried out. So, I put the book I was reading aside and started.It starts with some decent character building. The two main characters, Walt and Raymond are at very different points in their lives and on different sides of North America, but they both feel real. Their love interests, Mia and Vanessa are also well thought out and believable. Once the epidemic hits and starts spreading, things fall apart quickly and it's not until a significant portion of the population has died that things start really falling apart - everyone is too caught up in their day to day to panic. Once society does collapse, it happens quickly and it is still believable even if there is a little movie-hero-tough-guy action thrown into the mix. It's Believable and Fun.Then, the aliens arrive.The book becomes a very different story at this point. The pacing changes, the tension builds and characters die. The first part of the alien story is interesting as we try to figure out what's going to happen and as they start clearing away the remains of the humans in the LA basin to make way for themselves. I do like that the situations for the humans keeps deteriorating and I like that some of the characters we start to like are killed off. But, once the climax starts, the pacing changes again and it feels like a movie again.So, overall, I liked it and I say you should read it. It's pretty well written, it's funny in parts and tense in others. It's not perfect, but then few books are. It was good enough that I'm going to try some more of Robertson's writing - this time one of his short story collections.

This book surprised me. I thought it was an end-of-the-world book of one sort, and it turned out to be another... I won't spoil the twist, but I didn't see it coming. This is one of the best-written and most literary books in the genre I've read. Also at no point did I know where things were going, not up until the very last chapter. And the heroes aren't larger-than-life - they're actually life-sized, real people with real baggage and real shortcomings, chosen by chance and determination more than preparation to be survivors.

I was not sure this was a story I would enjoy, however once I got into it was pleasantly surprised. A lot more going on than the worldwide sickness wipes out most of humanity story. I was happy to see that this story continues through several more books which I am looking forward to reading.

I don't like missing books or authors and I don't like not finishing books, unfortunately I couldn't force myself to read this one much beyond the first chapter, the main character was such a twit I couldn't force myself to endure him through an entire story.

This was a well written story about a plague that sweeps the world...but there's more.The characters were developed and interesting, and the two storylines fitted the whole extremely well. I enjoyed the humour of the dialogue, especially between Raymond and Mia, and Walt's caustic way of thinking.There were plenty of unanswered questions - possibly resolved in the following books?Overall, an enjoyable, entertaining and thought-provoking story.Highly recommended.

There's nothing better than finding a new author, knowing that there are more books to devour after the first and I am very pleased to have discovered Robertson. The story is essentially the lovechild of The Stand and Independence Day - most of Earth's population is wiped out by a plague which is closely followed by an alien invasion, the originators of the plague. The author has, however, taken a much more interesting perspective of the aliens than is commonly found in popular SF. These are not all powerful, totally unbeatable beings who inexplicably can be wiped out by something trivial but much more "ordinary". They can be killed with our weapons, they can be blown up. Their advantage is primarily that there are so few humans left and that we continue to kill each other as well as the invaders.As mentioned in other reviews some of the characters lack definition and at some points I found it difficult to follow conversations among groups but this is a minor niggle. There is also quite a lot of ponderous thought from the leads that prompted some page-skipping but generally speaking it's hard to put down and flies along quite nicely.I only had two proper moans and they really only apply to non-US readers: Firstly, the author uses a LOT of very US-local terms; store names, sports grounds, product brands, etc. which don't translate well outside the US and which had no other clues to their nature. Although it was usually possible to guess what was being referenced, sometimes it wasn't and this held up the flow. It would take little to add a few words of extra description to help overseas readers. Secondly, the author constantly uses "couple" without "of", as in "a couple miles", "a couple beers", etc. While I know this is common in spoken American English, I've not come across it much in written work and found it jarred with me, the more so perhaps because he uses the term so frequently.However, these are very minor complaints. I read this first book in less than 2 days and immediately bought the sequel and have plans to buy anything else he puts out. Great work, keep it up!