Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slatterly
Read by Paul Heitsch
Length: 10 Hrs 34 Min
Genre: Post Apocalyptic Science Fiction
Quick Thoughts: Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America is a head trippy, fascinating near future dystopian full of some awesome characters, wonderful scenarios and laugh out loud humor, yet despite all this awesomeness, the author’s style and my inability to handle the flowing transitions kept me from ever fully engaging with this read. It’s a book I can say was quite good, well written, and full of some very memorable moments, yet overall, I can’t say I especially enjoyed listening to it.
Grade: C+
You ever find one of those books that is so solidly in your wheelhouse that you just know you can’t go wrong. That if you described it to you friends, with the traditional “It’s like this awesome thing, meets this awesome thing set in the universe of this awesome thing” that it just sounds so damn good you salivate thinking about it. Yet, for some reason, it just falls flat for you. This was my experience with Brian Franccis Slatterly’s Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America. I mean, COME ON! Even the title is awesome. Thinking about the book now, I can list tons of excellent things about it. There was humor and adventure, and even a touch of romance. There were ninja duels and explosions and cross country travels in Post Apocalyptic America. Even the set up was pretty awesome. Liberation takes place in a post Economic crash America where the dollar has become so devalued it is almost worthless. Where other countries have called in our debt, and we just can’t pay leading to the collapse of our government. It’s a scarily realistic scenario, and Slatterly plays it out well, describing riots, the lack of resources, and starvation that would follow the fall of the United States. Slattery designs a slow boil apocalypse, one that I found quite intriguing. He deftly shows the rise of robber barons, chief among them a former smuggler names The Aardvark, criminals who already have the system in place to take control of the newest commodity in America, Slaves. The situation has become so dire, that Americans are willingly becoming slaves in order to eat, taking on indentured debts they will never be able to repay. Set within this world is a group of six former criminals who used to target people like The Aardvark with highly complex schemes and robberies. Yet. right before the fall of the US economy, one of the six turned on the one member of the group, the assassin Marco, who was like the glue that held the slick six together and formulated all their plans. Now, Marco has escaped from jail and wants to get the team back together for one last mission, to take down the Aardvark and put an end to the slave trade. I mean, this sounds awesome, right?
If you were to ask me to describe Liberation, I would call is Vonnegut’s Slapstick, or Lonesome No More (one of my favorite Vonnegut novels) with the over the top comedic style of The Princess Bride (an awesome book and movie) with a group of characters straight out of the TV show Leverage (pretty damn good show.) And who wouldn’t want to read that? Yet, for some reason, I never became engaged with the story. I think a big part of it was Slatterly’s style. The author used nonlinear storytelling, with a very fluid transitions, often leaving you unsure whether you are in the past or the dealing with current events. You would be fully immersed in a scene or time frame, and suddenly trasnition to another scens with a different character reflecting on the past, or trying to deal with something current, or a combination of both. It’s like there was a solid plot, but someone covered it in grease and I could never get a solid grasp on. Liberation was full of some awesome scenes. There is a wonderful duel between Marco and an assassin that is hired by the Aardvark to hunt him down, which is so stylistically similar to something in The Princess Bride I was expecting one of the characters to yell out “INCONCIEVABLE! I though Slatterly’s ending was brilliant, funny, fast and furious, and just a touch dirty, with a twist that while utterly destroying my suspension of disbelief, was a whole lot of fun. Yet, getting to these wonderful moments was the hard part. Whenever I felt like I was comfortable with the author’s style, he shifted and changed colors and revealed himself to be just an old man behind a curtain and not a grand floating headed wizard. It was disconcerting, and ultimately unrewarding. I honestly think Liberation is a good book. I believe there are people there who will be blown away by it. Even those people, like me, who struggle with it, will have discovered characters they love and moments they will remember, even if it’s in a mish mashed context of malleable transitions. Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America is a head trippy, fascinating near future dystopian full of some awesome characters, wonderful scenarios and laugh out loud humor, yet despite all this awesomeness, the author’s style and my inability to handle the flowing transitions kept me from ever fully engaging with this read. It’s a book I can say was quite good, well written, and full of some very memorable moments, yet overall, I can’t say I especially enjoyed listening to it.
I’m not sure if some of the transitional flow issues were due to the fact that the audiobook version lacked the visual cues that are implicit in a print novel. Maybe I would have enjoyed this more in print, but I really can’t fault narrator Paul Heitsch. In fact, I thought that Heitsch gave a solid reading, with a strong grasp on the characters, and even managed to capture some of the truly funny moments of the novel. Slatterly’s often lyrical prose, during some of the more engaging moments, managed to come alive in Heitsch hands. The Slick Six was a very diverse group spanning sex, race and nationality, and Heitsch handled each character appropriately, giving them soft accents and never falling into cartoonist stereotypes. He paced the novel well, particularly the finale, which was the most action packed moment of the book. I think that Liberation had to be a very hard novel to narrate, and despite my overall lack of engagement, I think Heitsch pulled it off as best as can be expected. This was my first experience with both Slatterly the author and Heitsch the narrator, and I’m actually quite interested in exploring more of both of their work.
The Guilded Earlobe 
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