Koepp had a chance to really hit it out of the park with this novel, but I think he buried the lede. This end of the world scenario - a worldwide power outage caused by an explosion on the sun and a direct hit of energy that overloads and destroys most of Earth’s electrical capabilities - is ok. But add to that the fact that it happens shortly after the Covid pandemic, and you really have something.

Our nerves and psyches already raw and cracked, how would we react to yet another worldwide challenge?

He lays it out there, and then goes on to write a rather paint-by-numbers account of the struggles of one family and the people in their lives. I was willing this novel to delve more into the post-Covid aspects of his characters, but he didn’t really do it enough for me.

Frankly, I listened to this one as an audio book while driving from gig to gig recently, but if I had been reading it from the page, I probably would have quit and picked up something else.

I kept hoping for something more, and feel like Koepp missed a real opportunity here to show us how people who are still reeling from one catastrophe deal with being handed another one.