Kamas Kirian's Reviews > The Rift

Overall, not bad, but could have been better. More like 3.5 stars, not quite 4.

The bad:
He starts off with a prelude to the story talking about how prescient he was about events happening like in the book. It's not hard to predict general natural disasters. The hard part is predicting when/where they occur.
The comparison between Fargo and Grand Forks is off. I'm not positive about the total taxes between the two cities, but my impression was that at the time GF had higher taxes. GF does have significantly higher taxes now. GF had some permanent levies in place that gave way. Fargo constructed temporary dikes each year. My opinion is that it had more to do with the organizational skills of Dennis Wallaker in Fargo than anything in '97. The '09 Red River flood was even higher.
The story starts off a bit slow.
Quite a few characters that I just didn't care about. Including several that were introduced somewhat late, had only a scene or two, and/or then killed off early. The only ones I really cared about were Jason, Nick and Jessica.
I'm not sure the motors on the bass boat would have worked without a complete teardown after having been submerged.
There was a fairly explicit sex scene at the end of chapter 4 that took the story nowhere. I'm not sure what the point of it was as it was already established that those two characters were sleeping together. Maybe he was trying to show he could write erotica?
I don't think there was a single example of a law enforcement or religious figure in the book that wasn't deeply flawed in character. They all seemed crazy, racist or homicidal. Wait, I take that back. The one black Methodist preacher was a decent guy.

The good:
The story moves along fairly well once the earthquake hits. It just takes awhile for it get to that point.
He did a good job of trying to make the racist sheriff, Omar, look sympathetic for the first half of the book. It was almost like he was using the KKK like just another fraternal organization like the Masons, Elks, Moose, or Knights of Columbus. But once things went to hell, his true colors showed through. Omar had a definite story arc.
Jason grew from a bratty kid to a pretty solid teen/young adult. I liked his character arc. For awhile it looked like his part might just be a modern Huck Finn floating down the Mississippi. He matured well while still remaining a modern teenager.
Nick grew on me. At first he seemed a little too depressed and dejected. Once his interactions with his friend, Biondi/Viondi?, started with them fishing he became a more likeable character. By the end of the book he was a real take-charge kind of guy and showed off some of his work skills along with what his Dad had taught him. His actions at the camp were possible a little over the top, but I still enjoyed it.
Jessica started out like she was going to be just another diversity hire that skated through the story because she was the-girl-in-charge (which unfortunately is something that quite a few stories over the last couple of decades have given us). But she did have to work through some problems thrown in her way and handled them with aplomb. Her story arc, while not as expansive as some others, was at the core of the book and tied all of the rest of the story together.
Larry was a little "meh", but wasn't a bad character. He just didn't have any real arc or emotional appeal to me.

The AudioBook was narrated beautifully. He gave each character it's own voice and used inflection, cadence, and accent to make it easy to identify the various people. One of the best examples of narration I've seen so far in my AudioBook journey. The AudioBook was formatted well with no obvious errors, skips or garbling.