Jolina Petersheim

I was excited about this because I needed to read a Christian Fiction title for a class, and I was worried about finding something I’d like in a genre I never read. The Alliance is such a neat idea: a post-apocalyptic story set in a Mennonite community. It was so creative to focus on people already used to a low-tech, self-sustaining lifestyle and team them up with outsiders to their community, Englischers, to work together for survival after an EMP attack. I hadn’t even considered the complication that most of the characters were pacifists, and how that would figure into a survival story, until I started reading. That angle intrigued me too.
I started feeling lukewarm about it around 65% of the way through. Leora’s internal struggles were getting repetitive, and the love triangle was irksome too. The book ended on a cliffhanger, a guaranteed star-dropper in my book, unless you’re Laini Taylor. The drug element introduced toward the end was one plotline too many, and I didn’t buy it. I liked Moses the most, but I didn’t think his faith journey was developed enough. It felt very sudden when he started making with the God talk. The faith of the community wasn’t delved into as deeply as I would have liked, and that made it feel sort of hollow to me.
Being a longtime Walking Dead fan, and watching the protagonists in that series move farther and farther from their pre-apocalypse moral compass, this book was an interesting contrast. I liked the ideas she was playing with, and I wish I had liked the execution of them more.… (mere)