They spend all the first day within the fallout shelter; on the second day, however, they start suffering from aches and pains in their bodies and still feeling tired, hinting that they have already started being exposed to radiation.

I think the author wrote the story this way to try to narrate different events happening at the same time. The novel was later adapted for different entertainment types including an animated film, radio play, and stage play. Max recently escaped from the School, the lab were she lived, and knows of a horrible plan that the scientist want to fufill. I still find that I enjoy crime movies more than novels, but if the crime novel is good enough, then I'll still feel the enjoyment one way or another. All I can say is that I can't believe I'm reading the prequel to the series that I loved when I was younger.She learns that many of her friends and colleagues, as well as her late husband, are involved with the School and its human experimentation. I must surmise that even the combined powers of Dickens, Poe, Kafka or the most literate modern storytellers could not bend Patterson into writing a competent tale should they slap him a thousand times in the face with their own manuscripts. I remembered it as much more exciting and fast-paced than it is—I was actually bored here and there. Their reminiscences are used both for comic effect and to show how the geopolitical situation has changed, but also how nostalgia has blotted out the horrors of war.

La capacità immensa di Patterson di tenermi attaccata alle pagine resiste anche in questo romanzo, dove i protagonisti, nel tentativo sia di capire cosa sta succedendo e di salvare Max dai suoi inseguitori diventano comprimari, lasciando la scena al sogno più grande dell'uomo: volare. There was also a BBC Radio 4 dramatisation in 1983, with the voices of Peter Sallis and Brenda Bruce, directed by John Tydeman.On the third day, misreading advice given in government leaflets, they come to believe that they must stay in the fallout shelter for just two days rather than two weeks. The two pamphlets mentioned in When the Wind Blows are based on actual public information series such as Protect and Survive. Whilst the likes of Dan Brown have been the most recent perpetrators of this populism, Patterson has certainly been the more consistent of the two and quite arguably the worst offender of all modern hacks. What should have been an interesting, pulse accelerating story, turns into something slightly boring just because of the way he tells it.