The Emergence | ARC Review – A Dance With Books

Thank you to author A.O. Khalil for the review copy in exchange of an honest review. This does not change my opinion in anyway.

They were just sinkholes, harmless sinkholes that were spreading like wildfire across the country. Then the disappearances started. A few people here and there then the entire army, gone in one night. Jay and Jule quickly find themselves thrown in the middle of a dangerous situation that only gets worse when something else comes that takes everyone by bloody surprise.

As they make ready to leave to gather with the rest of the family, something comes out of the sinkholes and begins attacking and killing everyone in sight. Before they know it they are in the middle of a war with an unknown enemy and an unknown agenda.

Will Jay and Jule survive their encounter or will they find themselves twenty-six feet under at the bottom of a sinkhole?

Very early on in reading this I couldn’t help but feel that this book would be well suited for those that like The Walking Dead. It certainly has the horror elements, and the idea is great.

The action scenes were well written and had a good pace. I could picture portions of it in my head. However the scenes in between had a disruptive flow. The conversations between characters felt off. Some responses didn’t feel logical. The characters also felt very stereotypical. They weren’t deepened out enough. Some of the foreshadowing was also too obvious. It made a portion of the novel feel incredibly forced.

The different species, tribes and all that was great, but I need more than this. In that I think it would have been great to have gotten another perspective than Jay’s that could have given us more on that.

As mentioned, the characters could have used some deepening out. Jay got on my nerves a bit at the start. He whines, and seems to like to play the hero as he called it himself. It’s not playing the hero, it is doing whatever you need to to survive. But he grew a little on me throughout the novel. I liked Pete and Jule’s father. The rest didn’t stand out a whole lot though, and there were too many characters to keep straight as they were introduced at a rapid pace. These guys also need to learn that the females don’t need them to protect them. It was a bit annoying. I’m glad that at least the females tried to fight against that.

I wanted to like this novel, because I think the idea has a lot of potential, but as a whole it felt a little flat to me.