Yellowstone: Book 3
Because my family has been in the process of moving, I’ve needed something on audio to keep me interested while mindlessly packing boxes and cleaning hidden corners of the house. Thankfully, I’ve got the Librera app on my Android, which turns any e-book file into an audio book with halfway-decent text-to-speech. I don’t use it much for my fun reading like this, but it was a lifesaver during my doctoral work when I had countless scholarly journals to read, and it was perfect for my packing hours.
Book 3 in this Yellowstone series picked up right where Book 2: Inferno left off. Ashby and Jack are on the run from the fallout of Yellowstone’s destruction. They find themselves in some hairier predicaments than in the previous book, especially when it comes to the renegades and outlaws who view the collapse of normal society as a greenlight to their ways of anarchy. For that reason, the main characters find it necessary to kill, and in doing so face the moral crisis of what it really means to kill.
There’s some discuss between Jake and Ashby on this topic, the difference between murder and killing for self-preservation. They talk about anger as a motivating factor over self-defense and have to weigh the actions against their consciences and learn to move on past….mistakes.
It’s interesting in this installment to see how some communities band together while others crumble and how some individuals step up to lead with character while others take advantage of those willing to follow them and prove themselves the selfish monsters they’ve always been. It’s post-apocalyptic, so the ties are natural, but it really reminded me of the various places in which the main characters of The Walking Dead found themselves. There are good people and there are wicked people, and earth-shattering events like this will sift them all to the surface and true colors will be seen. It’s not unlike what Jesus talks about in the parable about the wheat and tares in Matthew 13:24-30 (or the sheep and goats in Matthew 25:31-46). Perhaps this is why dystopian books are so appealing to people—the masks are off and there’s nowhere to hide.
It’s been fun to follow Jake and Ashby on their treks West and to watch them gather stores, strategize, and think on their feet. The conclusion to this book sets us up for a whole new scenario in Book 4, which I’m really looking forward to!
©2023 E.T.
Read More from Bobby Akart:
- Yellowstone: Hellfire (2018)
- Yellowstone: Inferno (2018)
- Yellowstone: Fallout (2018)
- Yellowstone: Survival (2018)
Read More Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Novels:
- The Last New Yorkers by George Allen England (1911)
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
- The Last Ship by William Brinkley (1988)
- Minority Report and Other Stories by Philip K. Dick (2004)
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
- The Hunger Games (series) by Suzanne Collins (2008)
- Son of Heaven (series) by David Wingrove (2011)
- Contamination (series) by T.W. Piperbrook (2013)
- The Giver by Lois Lowry, adapted by P. Craig Russell (2019)
- Fairy Godparents: Raising a Fairy Child by Indahari Setyo (2020)