Agenda 21: Into the Shadows Audio CD – Unabridged, January 6, 2015

I really liked the first Agenda 21 book and had high hopes for Into the Shadows, but it just wasn’t very good. There were giant plot holes that left me yelling in my head (and occasionally out loud) about how it didn’t make sense. For example, the little family walked for days and were still very near the mansion where the compound leaders live and the farm commune where the food is grown. That’s fine and explained by saying the river they were following meanders. The problem is, they ended up being taken in by an elderly couple. The elderly couple lived in a cave right by the mansion and farm commune and yet, somehow, they escaped detection for 17 years. Emmaline is constantly worried that their presence would bring the Earth Protection Agency people to the elderly couple. While that could happen, if they had survived without being discovered for almost two decades, why in the world would they be likely to suddenly be found just because the little family was there. The way the points of view switched was good except for one thing. The Emmaline chapters were told in first person while all other were in third person. That was actually rather annoying to me. Then there was the preachiness. The book would be going along fine and then there would be a section with hit-you-over-the-head “this is what you must learn from what you are reading” preaching (religious and political). I never quite figured out why the insistence that people only would want to be free if they knew their history (after all, Emmaline wanted to be free before she ever learned any of the history). The characters are all very flat. They never changed and most of them were quite dull. Many parts of the story moved very slowly. It’s a dystopian novel about running from human predators and learning how to live in the mostly uninhabited wild world. It should have been anything but slow. The afterword was written by Glenn Beck and warned of the evils of Agenda 21. Into the Shadows was a definite disappointment. I don’t really recommend reading it.

When I read the authors' first  Agenda 21  novel, I thought it was a superb dystopian view of the living hell into which anti-human environmental elites wish to consign the vast majority of the human race who are to be their serfs. I wrote at the time “This is a book which begs for one or more sequels.” Well, here is the first sequel and it is…disappointing. It's not terrible, by any means, but it does not come up to the high standard set by the first book. Perhaps it suffers from the blahs which often afflict the second volume of a trilogy.First of all, if you haven't read the original Agenda 21 you will have absolutely no idea who the characters are, how they found themselves in the situation they're in at the start of the story, and the nature of the tyranny they're trying to escape. As the novel begins, Emmeline, who we met in the previous book, learns that her infant daughter Elsa, with whom she has managed to remain in tenuous contact by working at the Children's Village, where the young are reared by the state apart from their parents, along with other children are to be removed to another facility, breaking this precious human bond. She and her state-assigned partner David rescue Elsa and, joined by a young boy, Micah, escape through a hole in the fence surrounding the compound to the Human Free Zone, the wilderness outside the compounds into which humans have been relocated. In the chaos after the escape, John and Joan, David's parents, decide to also escape, with the intention of leaving a false trail to lead the inevitable pursuers away from the young escapees.Indeed, before long, a team of Earth Protection Agents led by Steven, the kind of authoritarian control freak thug who inevitably rises to the top in such organisations, is dispatched to capture the escapees and return them to the compound for punishment (probably “recycling” for the adults) and to serve as an example for other “citizens”. The team includes Julia, a rookie among the first women assigned to Earth Protection.The story cuts back and forth among the groups in the Human Free Zone. Emmeline's band meets two people who have lived in a cave ever since escaping the initial relocation of humans to the compounds. They learn the history of the implementation of Agenda 21 and the rudiments of survival outside the tyranny. As the groups encounter one another, the struggle between normal human nature and the cruel and stunted world of the slavers comes into focus.Harriet Parke is the principal author of the novel. Glenn Beck acknowledges this in the afterword he contributed which describes the real-world U.N. Agenda 21. Obviously, by lending his name to the project, he increases its visibility and readership, which is all for the good. If there's another book in the series, let's hope it returns to the high standard set by the first.

This was a wonderful sequel to Agenda 21, and I am hoping there will be a third releasing soon to complete the story. After reading the first book, I already had planned in my head how I foresaw the future and what I would want to happen next. I was mostly happy with how this book followed along with what I thought would happen, but there were enough twists and differences in my prediction and how it was written to add some excitement and twists to it. There really must be a third book though, as I don't feel this one leaves us completely satisfied. Not as much of a cliff hanger as after the first Agenda 21 thankfully. The plot is steady, the characters from the first book are developed a bit more throughout this one, and the new characters are interesting and immediately likeable or deplorable (as the situation warrants). This isn't a book full of happy endings, but it is made to be that way. I like theprojection of what COULD happen in an extreme case if our world continues on it's current path. As already set in motion by real world events. Is it a bit extreme in the prediction, yes. Is it impossible for this to happen, not at all. If you like thrillers that could be based IRL, then you will like this book. It isn't a sci-fi far out there thriller but more of a thoughtful read. I've already passed both Agenda 21's to a friend and my father and their opinions mirror mine. We all liked them!

A must read to get the feeling of what it could be like, if they could pull it off. Your duty to get this book out there and hopefully get those that sleep to lift the veil.

not read yet but will be surprised if not as gripping as the first book

Excellent book and author!

Very well written. I was captivated from the very first page. Would like to see a sequel...."how america was reborn"