Fourth Dimension by Eric Walters

© Cassie Tiner 2018

Fifteen-year-old Emma just moved to a new city with her mother and her little brother. Their apartment building is still under construction, so regular power outages are not uncommon. When the power goes out just as they are leaving for a weekend camping trip, they don’t think much of it. That is until their car won’t start and their cell phones die. Not to mention all of the cars that are no longer working, parked on the road outside their building.
Since they are already packed for their trip, Emma’s ex-marine mother decides they will take their gear and canoe to a small, uninhabited island. As the outage continues, people become desperate and suddenly things are far from safe as the threat of violence increases.
What would happen if suddenly the things that you use and count on everyday suddenly quit working? Would you know how to get food and water? How to build a fire?
Personally, I am not the biggest fan of post-apocalyptic fiction. They’re so realistic. This novel, however, I found to be a great read that helped highlight our dependence on modern technology and convenience. When the power mysteriously quits working, the citizens in Emma’s new city home don’t handle it well because very few of them have the knowledge that allows them to survive without it. The longer the power remains out, the more desperate everyone becomes, bringing out the strengths and the weaknesses of each individual, as well as, bringing out the worst in them.
The setting allowed me, as the reader, to envision this happening nearly anywhere. Usually being able to imagine this sort of scenario in my own backyard would be one of the reasons I would not have enjoyed this novel but for some reason that was not the case here.
Reading this novel made me extremely thankful to family and friends who taught me how to grow food, build fires and shelters, and purify water throughout the years.
This book is listed, on Goodreads, as the fourth book in The Power of Three series by Eric Walters. However, since the main character shifts for this installment, I was able to read it without any difficulty or confusion. The author himself has informed me that the fourth book can be read without reading the first three.
I was happily surprised by how much I enjoyed this novel and would give it four out of five stars.
I would recommend this novel to fans of post-apocalyptic fiction such as The Road.
I won my copy of this novel on LibraryThing.com for the sole purpose of providing an honest review.

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