J.L. Bryan’s Dominion

About a year ago Amazon’s “people who also bought this book” recommended Dominion by J.L. Bryan to me as a book commonly bought by people who also bought Republic.

I finally picked up the Kindle edition of Dominion this week, and I was blown away.

The premise of the book is simple: it’s 2036, and the United States is ruled by a totalitarian regime that came to power following a nuclear explosion in Columbus, Ohio. Daniel Ruppert, the main character, is a newscaster for a popular nightly news program, where he recites manufactured news before his audience every night. But we learn that Daniel longs for the days of journalism he was originally trained to do, and he has been secretly logging on to non-monitored networks to pick up information that hasn’t been pre-processed by the federal government.  As the story progresses, he stumbles onto more and more dangerous information that brings him very unfortunate attention from the Department of Terror, the Dominionist Church, and others.

The first third of the novel, which sets the stage for what will come, is very reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984, but about a third of the way through takes off in a different direction.

The book was well written, with believable and likeable characters and suspense that kept me stuck to the page when I should have been asleep or writing something of my own. If you liked Republic, you’ll almost certainly enjoy Dominion.

 

2 Comments
  1. Barrie Suddery

    I read this book a while ago and really enjoyed it. The characters are well written, the plot scarily believable and the pace well set.

    I highly recommend it.

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