Rescued by Brian Brown

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pilot and firefighter Brian Brown, his wife and younger daughter head out in his plane for a weekend with the older daughter. Unexpected, severe weather sends the plane into the side of the mountain. Injured, cold and with little provisions in a remote area, they question if they will make it off the mountain. Then God intervenes.

This is an amazing story. A plane like this flown into a mountain just doesn’t equal survivors, but the plane hits in the only way it could hit and not kill everyone. There is a weak, intermittent cell phone signal where none should exist. Over and over you can see the hand of God intervening and bringing about the survival and rescue of this family.

The book is written from multiple viewpoints, which is good and bad. The story, of course, begins from with Brian narrating up until they unexpectedly realize they have a signal for their cell phone. At that point the 911 dispatcher takes up the story and it goes from person to person throughout the rescue effort and then returns to Brian for the end of the story. This is great in that you get the "whole story", so to speak. The downside is that you start a chapter in one person's point of view and it will take you to say where Heather, the daughter, is being lifted into the chopper. It then cuts to the next person in the story and you get their background (how they ended up in the position their in--firefighter, pilot, etc--and possibly even some rescue story in their past before picking up in THIS story and you may just get another perspective of the same section of the story or it may be further along in the story. This made the narrative somewhat disjointed at times. The other possible negative (depending on how it strikes you personally) is the complete transcripts of some of the radio conversations. Personally, I feel the story would have flowed smoother had the basics of the conversation been written and not every single word spoken.

I received a digital copy of this book through NetGalley.com. I hope that before it is released officially, the Kindle edition will have been much improved. Many times I would have to scroll through multiple empty pages (not counting the ones with place holders for pictures that weren't there) before finding a page with writing. Conversely, many of the first pages of the chapters were repeated as many as 15-20 times before the second page of the chapter showed up. That got annoying pretty quick. As I said, hopefully this will be fixed before its release.

All-in-all, this is a great book that I highly recommend.

I received a digital copy of this book through NetGalley.com for my honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.