77 Days in September by Ray Gorham
I rarely buy ebooks, especially those that are self-published. The reason being, the editing is usually poor, if done at all. But, I took a chance with 77 Days in September and not only purchased it, but paid $3.99! So I was really hoping it would be worth it.
I was pleasantly surprised. The plot was what I was looking for (end of the world/apocalyptic type), the characters were mostly likable and the story-line, though predictable, was interesting. It’s one of those books that makes you take a moment to think about how prepared you would be if there was some sort of disaster.
The book takes off quickly and moves along at a good clip. There was only one type/grammatical error that I could find and that was the use of “your” instead of the correct “you’re” when Hector was taunting Kyle about Kyle’s wife thinking Kyle was dead. The sentence was Your wife’s probably busy sleeping with the neighbors for food, and I bet she’s got the pantry stocked. Probably thinks your dead or something.” I noticed it mostly because it’s one of my pet peeves 🙂
I appreciated Kyle’s loyalty to his wife in the story between he and Rose. It’s something that I’ve found is very rare in most books and I really developed a higher opinion of the author because of it. I also appreciated the lack of foul language in the book. I don’t know why authors feel the need to cheapen their works by having most, if not all of the characters swearing in every other sentence. It’s distracting and frankly, sounds stupid. There are instances in certain books where it just fits with the character and the story, but for the most part it just muddies up good dialogue and cheapens the entire book. So thank you Mr. Gorham, for rising above and relying on your writing abilities to tell the story.
The only part of the book I didn’t like was the weird conversation that Jennifer had with Carol about Doug’s behavior towards her (Jennifer). It just seemed way out of left field and didn’t really make any sense considering the type of person Jennifer was and the type relationship she had with her husband. It might have worked better if the author had built up to it a bit with Jennifer “loosing it” in other parts of her life. The scenes with Doug were just weird and unlikely – she needed to either be submissive or beat the crap out of him.
Am I glad I read this book? Absolutely. Do I think it was worth the $4? Sure, why not? I read a lot of books of a huge assortment of genres. Books by established authors, new authors, self-published and I’d rate this closer to the top of the self-published group. I’d read more books by this author and think he is pretty solid, well on his way to a successful career, if that’s what he wants.
And for my favorite lines in the book:
“We’ve been so conditioned to think that the government is always going to be there to fix things that we just expect everything to work out. But now that the government can’t take care of us, we’re almost too helpless to do anything for ourselves.”
Amen, brother. I don’t think people understand how important it is to be able to take care of yourselves and your family/friends/loved ones in an emergency. This country was built by strong, self-reliant people and we should honor those people as well as those who have fought to maintain our great land by helping prepare ourselves and do our part in being responsible, self-reliant citizens. 77 Days in September is one of many stories of what could really happen if a major disaster struck. And the people who will survive, like those in the book who survived, will be the people who realize that.