Excellent book! Great characters and a brilliant storyline. I would highly recommend this book.

While I think the character development could have been better, Hickie delivers a suspenseful and nicely paced plot that keeps a reader interested to the end in this page turner.

What would you do to keep your loved ones safe?? Hannah is faced with that situation when she hears of a deadly flu outbreak. Although it hasn't reached Australia yet, she has this nagging feeling. Her oldest son is scheduled to go on a school trip, but she has a bad feeling. Call it "mother's intuition" or whatever, but, she reluctantly lets him go on the trip.

While her son is gone the virus hits their town and they are not only cut off from their son but soon the rest of their world. Would you put your family at risk to help neighbors? How would you make the hard decisions that choosing between life and death puts before you?

This book was good. It brings to light the tough decisions we would all be faced with in our everyday lives while dealing with an outbreak. It did focus mainly on the family and not what was happening with the outside world such as looting and other crimes of opportunity. I would put this book more in the family drama category.

I received an eARC from the publisher through NetGalley.

This is a hard one to review. The scale on this book for interest would down, up, down, up, and down.
As in it started slow, then it was good, then it was slow, then it was good, then slow, then it ends.

I mean, yes, it would be hard to write a book about a family stranded in a house for however long this family was stranded. I think there were times when the author was able to accomplish that task and made it interesting. Then there were numerous times when that did not happen. Actually, there were more times when it didn't happen than there were when it did happen. I guess the only thing that really kept me reading was to find out whether or not this family made it and what happened to the world.

That leads me to the ending. The ending. The thing that I spent several hours reading and waiting to get to. It was delivered in about two pages, maybe three. It was like the author was on a deadline, out of time and just threw something in there. Let's just say I was disappointed. While I think I am being very generous with my three stars, I appreciate the time and effort authors put into a book. I just wish that I hadn't put any time into it.

Thanks to Little, Brown and Co. for approving my request and to Net Galley for providing me with a free e-galley in exchange for an honest review.

I did not finish this book as I did not engage with the story or the characters.