About the Books
Title: The Last Orphans
Author: N.W. Harris
Series: The Last Orphans #1
Genre: YA Dystopia
Pages: 274
Edition Read: Kindle eBook
Dates Read: January 21-24, 2024
Blurb: One horrifying day will change the life of sixteen-year-old Shane Tucker and every other kid in the world.
In a span of mere hours, the entire adult population is decimated, leaving their children behind to fend for themselves and deal with the horrific aftermath of the freak occurrence. As one of the newly made elders in his small town, Shane finds himself taking on the role of caretaker for a large group of juvenile survivors. One who just happens to be Kelly Douglas—an out-of-his-league classmate—who, on any other day, would have never given Shane a second glance.
Together, they begin their quest to find out why all of the adults were slaughtered. What they find is even more horrifying than anything they could have expected—the annihilation of the adults was only the beginning. Shane and his friends are not the unlucky survivors left to inherit this new, messed-up planet. No, they are its next victims. There is an unknown power out there, and it won’t stop until every person in the world is dead.
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Title: The Harvest
Author: N.W. Harris
Series: The Last Orphans #2
Genre: YA Dystopia
Pages: 351
Edition Read: Kindle eBook
Dates Read: January 25-31, 2024
Blurb: In the wake of the apocalypse, nobody is safe.
Shane Tucker and his friends thought they managed to save the world from the destructive machine that killed off most of its adult population. Unfortunately, a war nobody was prepared for has only just begun. Now they find themselves joining ranks with a secret organization that will train them to fight for the right to survive. Taking refuge alongside other teenage survivors in a hidden base set deep within the mountains, they will learn how to repel an imminent attack by an ancient race of aliens.
Determined to safeguard the children under their charge, Shane and his friends compete for the ultimate prize—a suicide mission against the flagship of the alien fleet. While Shane’s feelings for Kelly deepen, along with his need to protect her, he finds emotions clouding his judgment. He’ll gladly die for her. But he refuses to die with her. No amount of training can prepare them for what is to come. Everything the brave teenagers have endured thus far will be eclipsed, with the freedom of humanity hanging in the balance.
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Title: Enslaved
Author: N.W. Harris
Series: The Last Orphans #3
Genre: YA Dystopia
Pages: 265
Edition Read: Kindle eBook
Dates Read: February 1-7 2024
Blurb: If he loses her, he’ll lose his will to fight.
Shane and his friends survive the first major attack against the enemy, destroying the alien ships that came to harvest the children of Earth and turn them all into slaves. However, one ship escaped, and the aliens have captured Kelly. Shane will do whatever it takes to save her, but turning his back on his friends could jeopardize the whole mission.
The enemy invades Kelly’s mind, turning her into a slave soldier. She’ll follow their orders, even if it means murdering her friends, including her little sister and Shane. She is helpless, trapped inside her body while it performs heinous tasks under the direction of her new masters, while her sanity and desire to live fade.
Shane returns home to make a rescue attempt, only to find Kelly commanding an army of human slave soldiers, and she’s determined to make him join her ranks. Will Shane save Kelly before she gets to her sister, or will she help the enemy enslave the rest of humanity?
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Title: Darkest Days
Author: N.W. Harris
Series: The Last Orphans #4
Genre: YA Dystopia
Pages: 313
Edition Read: Kindle eBook
Dates Read: February 8-14 2024
Blurb: The ancient slave mongers who killed the adults and enslaved the children have angered a more advanced species of aliens. Composed of pure energy, this superior race has attacked the Anunnaki home world and is now setting a course for Earth.
The energy-based aliens believe in a system of trial by battle. They seek to push Shane and his friends into the arena with the ones who killed their parents. The results will determine if humans deserve to live, or if they should be made extinct as well. It’s up to Shane to keep his friends–and an army of kids who look up to him–alive. They’ll be fighting not just for their own lives, but for the fate of the entire human race. Can the enemy of Shane’s enemy be his friend, or is this just another species determined to exploit and destroy them?
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Review
I really wanted to like this series more than I did. I always feel bad when I don’t love something, and this one was not a bad read, but it wasn’t great.
I’ll start off with the good parts. I really enjoyed the characters. I loved Shane and how he was characterized. He went through some very horrific things and had leadership sort of thrust upon him, but he also had a lot of doubts and a lot of worries that made him very believable. It wasn’t just a regular hero archetype. He was scared. He had survivor’s guilt. He didn’t ask to be put in charge of anything, but he just had that quality that made people rely on him, a responsibility that he took very seriously even though he was afraid he wouldn’t live up to expectations.
There were several other really good characters in these books and I liked seeing how a bunch of unlikely kids in town came together to survive. Kelly, the cheerleader and popular girl who was actually a sweetheart, working to protect her little sister. Tracy, the bad ass who you knew was going to go into the military one day and had a lot of knowledge from ROTC that is super helpful in an apocalypse. Steve, the football player who may have more brawn than brains, but also has a huge heart. It was also really cool to see a bunch of teens from around the world come together to try and save it. They don’t like each other at first, and the culture clashes were pretty dramatic, but seeing everyone become a team to fight for humanity was really beautiful to see. Too bad we can’t do that in real life.
Now some of the not so good stuff. If a good part of your story involves a training montage to get your teenage soldiers ready to fight the evil aliens, then there shouldn’t be a plot device that lets you just download information into their brains and bodies because you ran out of time. That was my big issue with the second book in particular: all this training to learn fighting techniques and lessons to memorize codes to get into the enemy alien ships, and they could have just inserted that information directly without all the work. It felt a bit like the author ran out of time and just needed to push the story forward.
Speaking of the aliens: they were kind of boring. Basically, the Anunnaki were just humans with better technology. Other than the tech, there wasn’t anything in particular that stood out about them. They reminded me of the citizens of the Capitol in The Hunger Games, in the way that they looked down upon the Earth humans. While their spaceships and technology were cool, there was nothing that really connected the reader to the Anunnaki themselves. In the fourth book, we are introduced to another alien lifeform which has no characterization whatsoever and exists only to push the humans and the Anunnaki together. It is basically a godlike creature who can kill anyone anywhere with just a touch of energy and who has a bias towards the humans. We don’t know it’s motivations or why it’s doing any of this. It just exists and causes chaos for everyone, which also just felt a device to move the story to a conclusion but didn’t have any real meaning.
Also, the ending was incredibly abrupt. Just bam, the book ended as soon as there was a conclusion reached. Nothing more.
GoodReads rating: 3 stars for all four books. They weren’t bad, just not great. I was honestly just glad to be done with it.
Categories: Books I've Read
Life With No Plot 
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