Review: Ashfall by Mike Mullin

Title: Ashfall
Author: Mike Mullin
Series: Ashfall #1
Publisher: Tanglewood Press
Publication Date: October 11th, 2011
Source: Purchased
Purchase: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Under the bubbling hot springs and geysers of Yellowstone National Park is a supervolcano. Most people don't know it's there. The caldera is so large that it can only be seen from a plane or satellite. It just could be overdue for an eruption, which would change the landscape and climate of our planet.

For Alex, being left alone for the weekend means having the freedom to play computer games and hang out with his friends without hassle from his mother. Then the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, plunging his hometown into a nightmare of darkness, ash, and violence. Alex begins a harrowing trek to seach for his family and finds help in Darla, a travel partner he meets along the way. Together they must find the strength and skills to survive and outlast an epic disaster.

I have wanted to read Ashfall for ages. Ever since I read the Last Survivors books by Susan Beth Pfeffer, I’ve had this slight obsession with anything revolving around natural disasters. I finally bought Ashfall and Ashen Winter late last year, determined I was going to get to these if it killed me. So when I saw the final book Sunrise pop up on NetGalley, I jumped on it. It was the perfect opportunity. Now I had to squeeze them into my reading list.

I’ll tell you what, I will forever wonder what the hell took me so long, because I loved it just as much as I thought I would. Ashfall is full of win on all fronts. It follows Alex, your average male teen. He’s into playing his video games and hiding out away from his moms constant nagging. He’s typical and very relatable. When his parents and annoying little sister go to visit his uncles farm the unthinkable happens.

Yellowstone blows up! Can you freaking imagine! This was written out perfectly, I sat on my couch scared out of my panties reading this crap. You would think the Ashfall is the worst of the situation, but there are so many other obstacles you wouldn’t think of. It was positively frightening and realistic feeling. The stuff this poor kid goes through, “Oh my heart.”

“Ask someone to lock you in a box with no light, nobody to talk to, and then have them beat on it with a tree limb to make a hideous booming sound. Do that for hours, and if you’re still not bat-shit crazy, you’ll know how we felt.”

He sets out to find his family and runs into all kinds of horrible things on the way. The one good thing he comes across is Darla and she’s bad ass. I loved her, and together they make a great team.

I absolutely loved this book. It’s rough, and not for the faint of heart, because seriously if something like this really happened, we would be in a world of shit. They go through a ton of horrible things. :( I’ve already started Ashen Winter and its’ just as engaging as Ashfall so far. 

How I feel about this book

About the author:



Mike Mullin’s first job was scraping the gum off the undersides of desks at his high school.
From there, things went steadily downhill. He almost got fired by the owner of a bookstore due to his poor taste in earrings. He worked at a place that showed slides of poopy diapers during lunch (it did cut down on the cafeteria budget). The hazing process at the next company included eating live termites raised by the resident entomologist, so that didn’t last long either. For a while Mike juggled bottles at a wine shop, sometimes to disastrous effect. Oh, and then there was the job where swarms of wasps occasionally tried to chase him off ladders. So he’s really hoping this writing thing works out.

Mike holds a black belt in Songahm Taekwondo. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and her three cats. ASHFALL is his first novel.

Find Mike:

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Labels: apocalypse, ashfall, mike mullin, natural disaster, reviews, tanglewood press, volcano, yellow stone