Final Exam

AshFall Review

Overall, I thought that AshFall was defiantly one of my most favorite books in a long time. The plot is just superb. There was a little bit of everything, like fighting, love, and survival. I am going to go into detail and tell you why it was such an amazing book.

I gotta tell you, the plot line is phenomenal. It is all about a boy named Alex who is home alone while his family is out and away in a town called Warren. But of all the days for him to stay alone, the Yellowstone Park Volcano erupts, causing ash to descend upon most of the western states. He must now set out to find the Family that might not even be there. I think this is amazing just due to the fact that nobody has ever done a story involving something like this. People visit this park and never stop to think about what is lying in wait beneath them. But of course there are some things that could be changed. Like when the volcano erupts, it would have been awesome if the lava had reached all the way to where he was.  It would get a lot more intense as he would have to deal with intense heat and not being able to breath.

But one of the main things that I absolutely enjoyed was have the characters were developed. The Characters kept how they were perceived as, and still was doing crazy stuff. Like how Alex showed his true colors while he helped everyone that he could. But at the same time, he was doing stuff like breaking into a car to start a fire to try and save a little girl from dying of hypothermia. And how Darla (met later in the story) is a hard-working girl that is willing to do almost anything to survive. I can totally see myself talking and interacting with them just because I know how their personalities are.

This is written in the voice of Alex (first person) and that also helps with the understanding of the character. The writing style of it is also great. Mike Mullin makes it so vivid in your mind of how it is going down in the story that it will stick into your head. Like in the part when he is describing when Alex is walking down his street and all he sees is death and ash, not to mention when he is telling us that Alex is being crushed underneath his dresser when his house is collapsing. If you were to read this, you would see that he shows us a world in which we have never seen.

But the whole main theme to this story is that sometimes, doing things alone is too hard for someone to do. He of course got through a lot of ground coverage by himself, but when he meets up with Darla, he survives a lot of the horrors that he encounters. Like when he is cut by Target in the hip, he would have bled out if it hadn’t been for Darla and her mother nursing him back to health. And he also needed the mental help because if you are alone long enough, you can start to go crazy.

In conclusion, this book was so good that it absolutely made its way into my top 5 books. All in all, it was a crazy book that showed a lot of courage in the characters and in the readers also, because you feel like you are going through the adventure right along with them.