Friday Reads: ARC Review of Sunrise by Mike Mullin!

For this week's final Friday Reads entry, I have the review of the final book in the Ashfall trilogy. Thanks a lot to Tanglewood Press for approving my ARC request on NetGalley!

This book is part of so many of my challenges! Since it's the final book of the trilogy it's part of the 2014 Series Challenge, as an ARC is part of my 2014 Review Pile Reading Challenge and ARC April and as dystopian/postapocalytpic book is part of my Dystopian Reading Challenge 2014!

Sunrise by Mike Mullin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Getting approved for Sunrise via NetGalley was the final push that I needed to finally start reading this series and I have to say I am mighty happy that I did! Thank you so much Tangledwood Press for approving my ARC request!

This was a fantastic series in one of my favourite genres! I love postapocalyptic and dystopian stories, and the Ashfall series is the perfect mix of both. We start from what is our normal life and through catastrophic events we're left in a new and terrifying world, without clear rules and nothing but doubts about the future.

Sunrise is quite the epic conclusion to this great trilogy. From the very beginning of the book we hit the ground running, since we start at the point were Ashen Winter left us, ready for a showdown and confrontation. As always I'll try my best to keep this review spoiler free, but some spoilers for the previous books can be expected.

Alex and Darla are two characters that I really loved in each and every page. They're teenagers that grow and raise to the challenge of their tough situation and that with their flaws still manage to have me rooting for them page after page. They have this wonderful relationship full of love, companionship, teamwork, respect and friendship. They butt heads occasionally and always manage to use each other strenghts to fix whatever problem that they're thrown in their way... and trust me, they get thrown plenty of tough crap at them in Sunrise!

Where Ashfall was about surviving a catastrophe and Ashen Winter was about deciding how to survive in the world that resulted after the catastrophe, Sunrise is all about deciding how to stop thinking of just surviving and think about how to live. Thinking about long term, about rebuilding, about the choices that will shape the world you're building for yourself.

Sunrise has plenty of action and fight in it, but also plenty of planning, of building, of politics even! Alex finds himself wishing he could ignore the mantle of responsability he's taken on, but he finds that he's good at being in charge and other people agree with him. I really liked seeing how sometimes the so called kids were better than the actual adults at adapting and realizing the change of the situation.

Sunrise has a large cast of secondary characters that were perfectly fleshed up, which helped a lot with not getting them confused or finding yourself wondering "who was that again?". I'm also glad not many of them were killed, even if there were some really tough parts in this book, about choices and the consequences. And if there's a character that irritated the heck out of me, it was Alex's mum. I just couldn't understand her mindset at all, no matter how hard I tried... I actually felt like slapping her a pair of times!

This was a fantastic and full of hope ending, despite all the hardships and tragedies that happened. Alex and Darla never stopped dreaming and fighting for a chance at a future together and they made room in their dream for a growing number of people that took their dream as their own too. Very much deserving of 4 to 4.5 stars!



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