Hey everyone! I’m back with my October read, Expatriates by James Wesley, Rawles. My brother really wanted me to read this book, so I decided it looked interesting and did so. As always, my content review comes first, then my personal review!
The Synopsis (Taken from Goodreads)
When the United States suffers a major socioeconomic collapse, a power vacuum sweeps the globe. A newly radicalized Islamic government rises to power in Indonesia, invades the Philippines, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, and finally northern Australia. No longer protected by American military interests, Australia must repel an invasion alone.
In the thick of these political maneuvers, an American family of missionaries living in the Philippines and a Texan petroleum engineer in Australia must face the fear of being strangers in a world in flux. Are their relatives back home healthy and safe? Will they ever see them again?
In its depiction of the authentic survivalist skills and techniques needed to survive a global socioeconomic meltdown, Expatriates is as informative as it is suspense-filled.
Content Review:
Positive Content: Much of the positive content in this book is intermixed with the Spiritual content, but there are a few I can mention here! The main characters are all very pro-freedom and aren’t just talkers, but also do what is necessary to preserve their freedoms and families.
One man mentions how thieving and law breaking isn’t a race issue, as people of all colors and cultures break the law as well as fight to protect it.
The two younger children mentioned in the book, the main characters’ children, are both homeschooled.
Rating: 5/5
Spiritual Messages: There are lots of Christian references made in this book, seeing that some of the main characters are missionaries. There are mentions of churches and denominations, Baptist preachers and Catholic priests, trusting in God, and praying. Bible references such as Psalms 37, Romans 13, John 3:16, and Psalms 91 are mentioned and/or partially written, and some lyrics to the songs “Jehovah Jireh” and “Be Thou My Vision” are listed.
People thank God for rescuing them, and the missionary father calls Christians God’s covenant people who God protects because of what Jesus did for us.
A man gets saved after a girl he likes asks him about his Spiritual condition. However, his conversion did seem very quick and unrealistic, though in the book he is shown to become a strong Christian.
Rating: 4.5/5
Romantic Content: Ah, my favorite section. If you’ve been following my reviews for some time now, you’ll know how picky I am with romance. Especially underdeveloped romance thrown into a book just to have romance. Unfortunately, I felt that was the case with this book. The main romance was super underdeveloped, seeing as the book was focused more on guns and survival than romance.
A guy literally meets a girl for the first time at a car wash and asks her out that moment, because she’s pretty. While it’s understandable for him, the before mentioned unsaved young man, the girl, who is SAVED, agrees, and even gives him her number after he tells her his spiritual state, which is not Christian at this time. As a Christian woman, she should’ve not even considered him, since it was a clear violation of 2 Corinthians 6:14. She doesn’t “get together” with him until after he’s saved, but again, since he’s just a baby Christian, he should be focusing on growing in the Lord, not dating a woman, and she, as the more mature Christian, should’ve been the first to clarify that. However the book shows (in my opinion, quite unrealistically) that he is able to grow in his Christian walk and still develop his relationship with her. (Also, the relationship isn’t really even dwelt upon, but apparently they get close enough to where the woman buys her wedding dress six months before he even asks her to marry him, and they at least get married at the end.)
Another guy, towards the end, asks another girl out, and the terminology the author uses is they “court”. Not sure if that means anything different from dating since again, it wasn’t dwelt upon, but at least I did like the light development of this romance better, though the spiritual states of the two involved was unknown.
Rating: 2.5/5
Violent Content: Seeing as this is a survival and war story, there is some violence. This author tends to be extremely descriptive in certain areas as well (which I will be getting to in the Other Negative Content and my personal reviews) and so there was a bit more description of the violence in this book than I expected. There are also mentions of certain triggering topics, such as suicide, murder, and rape, though none are really described. If you dislike descriptions any further than blood, you may not like this book, however the events themselves are very few; there is maybe two short battle sequences with very much detail.
There is talk of beheadings, rape and torturing people because they won’t turn islamic. Indonesian sleeper cells blow up an Australian navy, killing many soldiers, and a few battles and gunfights are mentioned. A man is grazed by a bullet in the head and kills and eats a snake raw. A drug-withdrawing man is said to have hacked his family to death with a machete before jumping over a bridge, and mass murder, suicides, and murder-suicides are mentioned.
In probably the two worst descriptive scenes, men shoot a bunch of looters, killing even the wounded, and blood and feces are mentioned. In the second scene, men are shot in a boat and killed execution style. The boat is said to be a bloody mess, and one of the men’s jaws are described after being shot in it. Blood, intestinal contents and brain matter are also mentioned.
Rating: 3.5/5
Language: There are three words I caught in the book, an H-word, D-word, and Ba-word.
Rating: 3/5
Other Negative Content: Okay, so I will be candid here, some of this may be mixed in with my own personal preferences, so I will first give a disclaimer. If you’re someone who’s super interested in or knowledgable about guns and military things, super interested in economic crashes and what could possibly happen afterwards and like books with a lot of details about said things, you might really like this book.
However, that’s not the case for me, and I will explain why. There was SO MUCH information dumping about guns: how they’re made, how they look, where they’re made, what ammo they use, what ammo is also compatible with it, all in military/technical terms. Look, I don’t care if a gun is a M1 Garand semiautomatic .30-06 rifle or a .22 rimfire Ruger 10/22 rifle. I don’t even know what they are besides guns, much less the difference between them. Now, if this happened once or twice, okay, nice little details there. But throughout the ENTIRE book, this type of stuff happened, to the point where I was skimming most of the end of the book. And it didn’t just happen with guns, it happened with ammo, equipment, military planes/ships/equipment, etc, you name it. While a few of these things were explained further than telling what the acronyms stood for, most of it was just overwhelming and unnecessary for the story, which is what I read a fiction book for. If I wanted to learn about guns, for example, I could pick up a magazine or manual.
There were also several things which happened which I felt were very coincidental and/or unrealistic. I mentioned two such things in the spiritual and romantic content places, so I won’t mention those again, however, there were more. I never felt the main characters ever had much of a problem. For example, the missionaries after the economic crash (referred to as the “Crunch”) have to flee the Philippines, they come to Australia. Now, the whole world is struggling economically, right? But the moment they land there, they ironically meet a couple who just open their house and home to them (they don’t even know these people) who are ironically Christians and ironically love guns and agree on everything the missionaries do. Again, if this had happened only once, or maybe twice, I could contribute it to God, you know, providing for them. But this happened all the time. I never got to see the characters really struggle. Yeah, they had to leave their home on a boat and travel for a month over sea (in a mostly uneventful trip), but everything just seemed too easy, or easily resolved, especially in a time where everyone is struggling and crime is abundant, that people would just give them stuff and blindly trust them, especially when they don’t know anything about them and are supposedly struggling financially as well. This happened with the other characters as well, which was very frustrating.
Even the government leaders seemed unrealistically too “good” and their plans seemed too idealistic. For example, the Australian leader’s solution to the Crunch was to get back onto the gold standard (which okay, that’s a good goal which I approve of) but her way of doing it was having the banks take now-worthless coinage and give people gold and silver in exchange. Um, yeah, no, I don’t think any banks are going to take worthless money and give valuables out in return. That would be like turning Monopoly money into the bank and asking for a hundred dollars in exchange. Don’t think that’s going to work.
There were also a couple negative things with the actual content itself. A guy stole some military stuff from a friend for pranking him. Some Christians drink wine in “moderation”, therefore it’s looked at as okay. The problem with that conclusion is, whenever someone takes their first drink, they never anticipate becoming an alcoholic.
Finally, there are also certain writing style rules which the author continually broke. One thing is that the story is not told in chronological order. One example of that, is towards the end, these Australians are putting together a force to fend off Indonesian invaders. The chapter talks about some of the things they do in preparation, then centers on one man who is only referenced a couple times later and talks about how he kills several of the Indonesians later, before the next chapter flips back to before the Indonesians have even landed. This happened multiple times, making it hard to read and tell the timeline.
Another major issue was the point of view (POV) violations. The author constantly head-hopped and switched POVs without proper structure. The story also needed some light editing. The most obvious place was where the missionary’s father’s name, Peter, was replaced with another main character’s name, Chuck, and thus refers to Peter’s wife, daughter, and past as Chuck’s.
Finally, most of the story relayed information, rather than showing it. Like I mentioned above, the book told the reader that one man killed several Indonesians. They could’ve easily shown that, and it would have been much more engaging. Only a few of the scenes actually showed things rather than told, and those were some of my favorite scenes in the book.
Rating: 2/5
Total Content Rating: 3.42/5 Stars
Personal Review:
This book was a bit of a rocky ride for me, and while not the hardest book I’ve ever read, unfortunately I couldn’t wait for it to be over. It could partly be because these style of books aren’t really my taste, so do take that into consideration. However, there were several other issues with this book which made me dock several stars.
For a Christian book, the romance (which was underdeveloped and rushed, I might add) was very… unchristian in the way the characters went about it.
As I mentioned above, the girl, who is saved, goes out on a date with and gives the unsaved man her number, while knowing he’s not saved. This is a clear violation of 2 Corinthians 6:14. After he’s saved, she gets together with him, instead of clarifying that, as a baby Christian, he should be focusing on growing in the Lord, not dating a woman. It was just very annoying.
There was also the style issues, which I went over in the Other Negative Content and will not re-list here due to the sheer number of them. The main for me, though, was the info-dumping and too much telling and not enough showing. I could’ve handled the POV violations and occasional typo, but the sheer amount of gun, and ammo info, military acronyms, and so on, many of which weren’t even necessary for the story, were just crazy. Also, I only learned like, two or three actual survival tactics that I’d know how to implement, maybe because I didn’t understand everything between all the acronyms and unnecessary details.
If you’re someone who’s super interested in or knowledgable about guns and military things, super interested in economic crashes and what could possibly happen afterwards and like books with a lot of details about said things, you might really like this book. However, if you’re not, I cannot recommend this book.
Personal Rating: 2.75/5 Stars
Thank you for reading! Have you read this book? Are you brave enough to try to read this book? Do you know of any good survival/dystopian or economic crash-type fiction books? Let me know in the comments below?
Kay Adelin 