Book Review – 299 Days: The Preparation by Glen Tate

First, be aware that this book is unfortunately packaged as a series of shorter novellas, so the price can be a bit high if you want to read the entire series, but if you are interested in the genre, it is worth the purchase!

The premise of the collapse – an economic collapse – has some interesting facets to it and will definitely get you thinking about the possibility of it actually happening.

Grant hit the button on iTunes to become a subscriber to the Survival Podcast. He could feel that something bad was coming to America. It was the strongest nagging feeling he’d had up to that point. The economy seemed to be a giant fraud. The analysts on CNBC kept saying that things were fine but Grant didn’t believe them. Jack Spirko was telling people to get out of the stock market. That was preposterous; The Dow was at 14,000. Spirko was adamant.

Then it happened. All kinds of banks were failing. There was full-on panic in the US. It looked like the financial system would melt down.

The start of the novel is really, really REALLY slow. You go back into the main character’s childhood and it is a lot of “telling” rather than “showing”, and it can be a bit much to slog through, especially when it doesn’t seem to add much to the novel overall – the information could have easily been woven into the story and been more effective – and gotten the reader straight into what most of the readers are most likely interested in – the collapse itself. It wasn’t until the 14th chapter that prepping was really brought into the picture, and then it was only as baby steps.

The main character hides his beginning prepping mindset, treating it as something that should be ashamed of and hiding it from everyone, so this may rub people the wrong way. However, just as many people feel this way about their prepping so other will related to it.

Grant went to the bookstore to find books on “survival”. He was looking at the books secretly; he didn’t want anyone to know what he was looking at. It felt like the first trip to the gun store. It was like he was looking for a book like “Beastiality Illustrated.”

Grant meandered over to the “Outdoors” section of the bookstore and waited until no one was looking. Then he pulled a book, the Special Forces Survival Manual, off the shelf and looked at it, shield it so no one could see the title.

One interesting thing about this book is that it is set in Forks – yes, the same small town as the Twilight series.