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By The Great Northern Prepper
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299 Days – Prepper Book Review

Sunday, November 18, 2012 6:42

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(Before It's News)

Ok so my last book review was on Rawles latest novel, and as you know, it wasn’t a glowing review, so I hope you know that I don’t just give wonderful reviews for EVERY book out there!

However, this book will be glowing, because I don’t have anything really negative to say about the book, really, however I will stick to my “3 and 3″ criteria, to keep things fair to past and future authors.

The book is a semi-autobiographical novel from “Glenn Tate” a resident to my south in the great Pacific Northwest state of Washington. The author and the main character “Grant” both grew up in Forks, Washington, a logging town with lower working class folks. He studies his butt off and got into college and then law school, marrying his college sweetheart and then embarked on the great American dream of a house a car and things. Grant (and Glen) then lost his focus on his roots, and what it meant to come up tough, and living in the country, his skill deteriorated and were lost, however the common sense of a country boy couldn’t be extinguished by the watered down dreams offered in modern society.

I don’t want to give away too much, but basically he gets a job that works with business and eventually gets a job with conservative who has won a public office and wants to change the government from within back to a more liberty friendly environment. Through this experience he learns the true feelings that pervade government offices and how they view citizens, time, money and value as “theirs” to do with what they please for the “greater good”.

Grant (and Glen) then start to have that feeling that we all got at some point, something isn’t right, the world we live in seems more and more and more like a bubble that can be pierced by the evils of the world at any moment and we aren’t prepared at all for it in any way.

Grant (and Glen) tries to explain these things to his spouse, who is DOES NOT want to listen at all, and is, unwilling (to say the least) to have “the conversation” about the need to prep. He begins to do this clandestinely, and eventually gets a bug out location that he stocks up with the things we all know and love, guns, ammo and food…lots of food.

Glen had sat down and began writing this not to be a book, but ended up writing and writing and writing and when finished he ended up with the massive 10 part series. So far Glen has published the first two books in the series with 2 books being released every three months.

I heard Glens interview on THE SURVIVAL PODCAST and was intrigued so I bought and downloaded them on my kindle. To be honest I was a bit apprehensive, as with a lot of Prepper fiction, books can be overblown, unrealistic, etc. Often they are still good reads, and if they have good practical info i can gloss over the aspects that are “unrealistic” for the sake of providing the needed fictional situation to provide the good information. However I think this does a disservice to the prepper movement, since it solidifies preconceived notions that folks already have about us.

That we are

Right Wing extremists who want to bring down the government
Gun happy Madmen
Hateful of those not like us
Delusional, bordering on psychotic
etc. etc.

Which of course is not the case.

We may be conservative but we don’t want to burn down the capital
We like guns, but we don’t take lightly the taking of life, even in justifiable cases
We don’t hate those who aren’t like us, we want to educate them on the realities
We may prep for extreme situations, but we prep mostly for the foreseeable and more common ones

Anyways, so i downloaded the first one on my kindle and in 2 days i had read it (foregoing sleep!) and then immediately downloaded the next one and read that one in about 2 days as well!

So here are my 3 and 3′s

THREE THINGS I LIKED

Its realistic, the book and the author don’t discount the more extreme possibilities, but it approaches a collapse scenario with what it will probably look like, not the conflagration of perfect storm variables into the total mad max scenario collapse. The governments wont go away the day the collapse happens, the collapse happens slowly and even while it is, people don’t realize it as such until after

The main character and secondary characters are based on real people, so the challenges they face are based on the real ones many of us face. We all don’t have a group of folks that are relatively well off that have a perfect off site location with good farmland and 20 years of food and ammo. Even if we do have a group we don’t have all that, and have to go about preparing and dealing with the realities of a collapse with what is available.

The conflict between spouses over the realities of our country and the need for prepping is particularly poignant for me, and for many of us. You see on every forum and every chat with folks in our community how “I’ve come to this realization about prepping, i want to do it, and I have started but my ____ isn’t really on board…” This book really touches on that and shows the difficulties that entails. The issue of a special needs child and the preps focused on that was also a great piece, that some of us have to face, but isn’t really written about.

THREE THINGS I DIDN’T LIKE

This was hard for me, so some of this may be a stretch.

The book is autobiographical so the author and character base their prepping and ways of going about it, based on the real experience. Not all of us have two good incomes, so some of the purchases and ability to buy what the character did may not be transferable on a personal level to someone who is on a smaller budget. This isn’t really a “knock” just something that some readers may go “that’s nice but I don’t have that kind of money”. However we all have to prep within our individual circumstances, these were the ones that Glen has so thats how he wrote it, which is why the “ring of truth” runs strong in this novel.

The character is gifted money, which frees them up to have a bug out location, not something every has, but it was a gift and the character didn’t buy a mountaintop retreat that has a moat of alligators, but had to haggle with his wife to get a mix of “wife friendly” and “prepper friendly”. So overall the scenario makes sense.

I had a difficult time reconciling the characters decision to leave his family when the wife refused. This is something some of us may have to face, with an ostrich spouse who refuses to recognize reality. I can say I WOULD NOT, but is that true? It would all depend on the demeanor of each of our significant others and that decision is ours. This isn’t a moral high ground moment for me vs the author, but when I read novels I am really into i inject myself into the characters position and that one was hard for me.

I can’t recommend this book enough to people to read. I have spoken to Glen through email and by phone, and he is as real as he comes through in the book and on other interviews. I will have Glen on as a guest on the GNP podcast for an interview mid November and it will be released prior to Books 3 & 4 coming out the beginning of this year. Being my first interview, I’m glad it is with a down to earth guy like Glen.

Read the Books and let me know if you have any specific questions you want answered and email them to me.