SANCTUARY by James Cleary

5 stars

In this near future dystopia, civil unrest has turned into all-out rioting in the streets of America, both urban and rural. Dramatic climate change has created desperate conditions.

Land even many miles from the coasts has been flooded. The central plains have turned into a giant dust bowl as all the plants and animals have died off, the all the pesticide laden soil permeates the air.

People are looting and building buildings in rage, and President (very MAGA) like declares an emergency to deploy solders.

In the streets of Miami, billionaire Brandt, his wife and son get whisked off by their high-paid ex-military security to head to their luxury bomb shelter. Their daughter is picked up off a mountain in South America to join them. Their security team rush to the family, and other key essential personnel, to a giant mansion in the middle of the Nebraska Great Plains, and the massive underground former nuclear silo that John Brandt has spent untold resources to convert to a luxury bunker he’s named Sanctuary.

Brandt is your typical narcissistic billionaire, self-absorbed, powerful, ruthless, and with ambitions to emerge from the crisis heading up a newly reconstructed American government. His superficial wife, a beauty who’s mostly absorbed in her workout routine sublimates any emotions in the face of Brandt’s dominance. Their young son, fragile and anxious, experiences the most trauma moving underground into the bunker. Their twenty-something daughter resents being cut off from her hedonistic, adventure seeking lifestyle.

But Brandt has not planned for everything. He’s got his exceptional trained ex-military security, and the long-time family cook and her young adult daughter, but many people he counted on arriving at the Silo failed to get extricated in time. The biggest thing that Brandt failed to anticipate nearby survivors desperate for food and shelter and facing death, willing to go over the top to breach the bunker. And a couple of these survivors worked on the construction of the bunker near their Nebraska hometowns.

It’s a tense, thrilling show down between the haves and the have-nots, between ruthlessness and human decency. It’s also far too credible a future dystopian scenario as real-life billionaires currently build out survival bunkers for themselves. You may come into this book with resentment for the callous selfishness of today’s billionaires, but you’ll definitely leave it hating them.

And the ending deeply satisfies.

Thanks to Berkley Publishing Group and NetGalley for an advance reader’s copy.

Stacy DeBroff

Stacy DeBroff, founder and CEO of Mom Central.com and social and digital consultancy, Influence Central, is a social media strategist, attorney, and best-selling parenting author. A sought-after expert for national media, she trend-spots regularly with national brands and speaks frequently to national and international audiences on a wide range of subjects, including influencer marketing, social media, entrepreneurship, and consumer trends. A passionate cook, gardener, reader, and tennis player, she adores this new chapter of post-college-age parenting.