The Gates of Babylon (Righteous, 6)

All the previous books in this series have been great, and as the erupting volcano first started to disrupt the world of the Christianson family, I didn't accept it with open arms. I enjoyed that the stories had been set in our present, and I was worried that taking the story out of that setting would diminish my enjoyment.

I was wrong. The settings in this book of a society in the midst of breaking down were great. In a way, I feel like this story is a part 1 because there is so much that is unfinished. I eagerly await the next installment to learn the fate of Blister Creek, and the rest of the world too.

For the book 6, Michael Wallace did a good job of keeping the action just as suspenseful as the previous five. It also offers a lot of insight, and it does offer a lot of knowledge about the Mormon religion.

This is the 6th and final book in this series. I have not read any of the rest of the series though I do have the first of the series on Audible. You will want to read the rest of the series in order to be able to understand some of the characters in this book. This series is about Mormonism and about Fundamental Mormons who are the ones that believe in polygamy. This also is about what happens to the world after there is a major volcano eruption. I will be going back and reading the rest of the series as I think I will get more out of this book if I do.

I kept passing on Michael Wallace's "The Gates of Babylon" because I could see that it was the 6th book in the series and I haven't read anything by Michael Wallace. Then I figured, "Why not?" especially since I picked up a bunch of books lately that I hadn't read the books that preceded and I seemed to do okay (this is not always the case though).

I think it isn't necessary to read the previous books in the series but I'm sure it probably helps to understand how the main protagonist, Jacob Christianson, doctor and heir to the leadership position of an offshoot Mormon community where polygamy is still practiced. His father was the community Prophet and it falls to Jacob and his sister to assume leadership.

This book concerns with the community's sense of doomsday coming. The community must prepare but there are power struggles between the top families, with the government and even in Jacob himself.

It wasn't what I expected but Wallace is a solid writer so the story kept me interested when I may have decided to pack it in.

And the saga continues. Usually when an author gets this far into a series the story lines start to become weak or predictable. Not so with Wallace’s Gates of Babylon. In this sixth book of the series Jacob Christianson is faced with imminent end times. How can the de facto leader of this LSD offshoot sect deal with his personal doubts yet still prepare his people for the end days?

Wallace has become a master of mixing the good, the bad and the ugly and coming up with a story line that is believable, even to the most skeptical of readers and has us reaching into his bag of tricks with includes polygamist dogma and features a misogynist community of break-away Mormons. The female characters of Fernie and Eliza are back, in counterpoint, to this male driven community and stand strong though still distant from the mainstream of American culture.

It seems this series is drawing to a conclusion and I, for one, will be sad to see it go.

What do you get when you take fundamentalist Mormonism, the left behind series, and the movies Red Dawn and The Postman and put them into a blender? You get the righteousness series from Michael Wallace. This novel shares about one community's struggle to maintain their faith and to keep alive is the middle of a barren wasteland America of the future. Faithful to their teaching, stores of food have been gathered for this day, and this makes the community and their resources the target of not so nice people from time to time. But they keep fighting and standing together....until book #7 in the series....