Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Everything in its Path

Author: Steve Alcorn

Narrator: Steve Alcorn

Format: Unabridged

Length: 3 hrs and 34 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-08-13

Publisher: Themeperks Inc.

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Just after midnight on March 13, 1928, the St. Francis Dam gave way, releasing a 160-foot-high wall of water. It was the worst American civil engineering disaster of the twentieth century.

Everything in its Path tells the story of Kate, an archaeologist's daughter, who is helping excavate a Chumash Indian site below the dam when she makes an alarming discovery: the dam is leaking! Intertwined with Kate's story is that of the prehistoric Chumash settlement. Tribe member Singing Bird is tormented by dreams of water, and her village being swept away. But leader Lone Wolf belittles her premonitions, and threatens her if she speaks out. As storm clouds gather, Singing Bird must decide whether to submit to Lone Wolf or try to save the tribe from the awful event she foresees. Across the centuries the two girls' fates are drawn together, culminating in a remarkable discovery as they struggle to save their loved ones from a force that will sweep away Everything in its Path.

Members Reviews:

Great Read

Great read. I thoroughly enjoyed this tale. Thank you Steve Alcorn for an interesting and historical tale.

An absorbing historical page turner

Steve Alcorn's short but fully realized novel is conceived as two parallel stories, one in 1928 and the other in 1540 (just two years before Juan Cabrillo landed in California in 1542, opening California to the modern world). The stories are set in the same physical location, a canyon downstream from where the St. Francis Dam collapsed in 1928. The protagonist of each story is a young girl of about 12 years old. Each girl has interests and intentions which were probably unusual for her culture.

Aside from the thriller-type page-turning dramatic aspect of both stories, I found the historical aspects interesting. For example, it certainly was fun to read about a time when gasoline cost just ten cents per gallon, and people needed to use blocks of ice to keep their food from spoiling. Also, it was a politically innocent time when you could just go out and dig up Native American skeletons and no one would think of you as doing anything but Archeology.

The story line from 1540 was fascinating since it presented a lot of information about the Chumash Indians, which are usually presented so matter of factly. Even though the book is short, by the end you have a very good picture of the details of Chumash daily life, which Alcorn somehow makes interesting, and a fairly rich imagining of Chumash spiritual life as well.

Aside from the anthropology, the best part of the book was the dam disaster and its aftermath. The preamble to the disaster, and the dam collapse itself, are related with an extremely light touch. You might expect that a novel about a civil engineering disaster to be filled with a dull engineering back-story. But then you might also expect to guess the endings of the stories of the two girls. You would be wrong in both cases.

I can honestly say that when Everything In Its Path arrived on my doorstep from Amazon, I started reading it right away, even though I was already reading a novel I had been looking forward to reading for eight years: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I actually found Alcorn's novel about the St.