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Oct 01, 2017susan_findlay rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
This is a quick read; I read it in one sitting. The pacing is good, and the author does a good job of building and maintaining suspense. I appreciated that she incorporated the omnipresence of cell phones today - both positive and negative features. The primary narrator is Joan, a mother who is trapped in a zoo with her young son. They had been about to leave, but ran into the tail end of a mass shooting. So, they had turned around to hide in the zoo to escape becoming the next victims. After the first several chapters, you expect Joan to be the only narrator. So, it's quite disorienting when, about a quarter of the way into the book, there's suddenly a set of short chapters each narrated by a different person also trapped in the zoo. I really didn't think those chapters improved the book at all; I would have cut them. There are also several chapters narrated by another character. Unlike the ones narrated by other victims, these chapters add a lot to the book; however, I didn't feel that they went far enough in accomplishing their presumed purpose. All in all, this was a decent book but it felt a bit incomplete (and would have benefited from dropping all but the two main narrators).