1. Snow & Ash, 2015
2. Rain & Ruin, 2015
3. Sun & Smoke, 2018
4. Fire & Fury, 2018
These books follow the stories of two teenagers in Canada after a nuclear war and during the resulting nuclear winter.
The books were written by an independent author, so the books have quite a few grammatical errors. The tense also shifts improperly between past and present tense.
The first book is extremely suspenseful and compelling. The second book is also very good. The third book lags some, and the fourth book is pretty much filler to extend the series. I did not find the fourth book to be that great.
The author's characterization is excellent. The weakness is the lack of description about what is happening outside. The reader is told that the the temperature is cold and that the world is in nuclear winter. Other than that, I had no concept of what was happening. Snow is almost never mentioned, so I pictured a gray sky (the clouds were mentioned often) and no snow at all. During the times that the characters venture outside, there is no mention of anything like snow.
The second book features acid rain that is so toxic that the skin is burned and sores develop. Later in the story, characters go outside to get their belongings that were left outside for weeks when the rain began. If the rain was able to eat through clothing and leave sores on the skin, then I don't understand how the characters' possessions would be just fine out in the rain.
I could also mention many other aspects of these stories that make little sense.
I really enjoyed the first story, but the quality of the stories deteriorates enough through the set that my opinion of the set is overall negative.
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