Book Reviews: The Planner and The Chosen

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On this, the eve of the 2012 Election, where the literal health and perhaps even, life, of our country hangs in the balance, I want to share with you two books, one a sequel of the other, that I read recently. In The Planner and The Chosen, Alexander Swann and her mother, Joyce Swann, present a tale of fiction that just may not be too far-fetched if our country continues on the progressive course on which it finds itself tonight.

The Books:

The Planner by Alexandra Swann — Forty-one year old Kris Mitchell has seen her entire life ripped away from her by the economic downturn. Once a top-producing real estate agent with a great business and a beautiful home, Kris is now barely staying alive selling a few houses a year. Her home has been foreclosed on and her long-time boyfriend has married someone else. When Kris gets an opportunity to become a Level 1 Planner for a new federal agency that has been created to implement the Retire America Act of 2013, she is grateful that for the first time in years, she will actually have a steady paycheck and a future. But as Kris works to implement the Retire America Act, she learns that the government’s new plan to confiscate all of the wealth and property of America’s retirees in order to ensure them lifelong care in the Smart Seniors Housing Program has some serious downsides. As she tries to help two thousand seniors, including her own parents, adjust to their new lives in Section W, Kris discovers what it really means to trade liberty for security.

The Chosen by Alexandra Swann and Joyce Swann — FIGHT FOR THE LAWS OF OUR COUNTRY! In the future, the U.S. government will be able to detain American citizens indefinitely without trial. In the future, your loved ones will leave for work one day and disappear, and you will never know what happened to them. In the future, only a small group of Americans will be willing to stand for freedom. What if the future were now? In this heart-stopping sequel to “The Planner,” Kris and Keith Mitchell are about to discover what it means to be The Chosen.

My Review:

First, you should know that I was sent The Planner for review. Secondly, you should know that I was so riveted by the story that I purchased the sequel, The Chosen, for my Kindle immediately upon finishing it.

In the first book, The Planner, we find a progressive U. S. government running completely out of control. Or maybe that should be running completely in control. In control of it’s citizens. Senior citizens living out their retirement years on Social Security and Medicare find themselves faced with a tough decision — give up all of their assets to the government and a sign a life lease to be taken care of in government housing, where all of their food and medical needs will be “met,” or face the discontinuance of their benefits. The main character of the book, Kris — out of work and homeless — is in need of a job and soon becomes the planner for the government agency running this program. It’s her job to convince the senior community that this is the best choice, and the first people she needs to convince are her own parents. When her parents make the difficult and desperate choice to live in Section W, and then disappear a few months later, Kris realizes what’s really going on — the extermination of American citizens.

In the second book, The Chosen, Kris becomes the desperate one. She is desperate to fight the U. S. Government after her husband and brother-in-law have been detained for “terrorism.” In this not so futuristic look at America, thousands of citizens are being detained and put to death without trial when the government, with which they disagree, label them as terrorists, based on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

I was glued to these books for an entire weekend. I literally could not put them down, reading them both in a span of about 3 days. They are at once suspenseful and frightening. I felt every emotion you could imagine — fear, anger, relief, sadness, and joy. I was reminded of the importance of standing up for what is right, both for the benefit of my own family, and for the country at large.

The NDAA is not a fictional piece of legislation. It was signed into law by President Obama on December 31, 2011. You can read more about it here. While these books are works of fiction, they are also a cautionary look at what could very well happen to America, in the very near future, if things do not change quickly– as in tomorrow.

Please prayerfully cast your votes tomorrow . . . and vote right.

The Planner and The Chosen can each be purchased at amazon.com, in both paperback and Kindle versions.

The Planner– paperback $15.50

The Planner– Kindle $2.99

The Chosen– paperback $15.50

The Chosen– Kindle $2.99

The Authors:

In 1986, Alexandra Swann graduated at fifteen years of age with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from Brigham Young University and a GPA of 3.85. The following year, when she was sixteen, she received a Master’s Degree in History from California State University. After graduation, she taught history and English as a second language for four years at El Paso Community College. In 1989, her book, “No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master’s Degree at Age Sixteen”, was published, in which she details her experiences with homeschooling. In 1998, Alexandra and her family started Frontier 2000 Mortgage and Loan, Inc. an El Paso, Texas-based mortgage company providing residential and commercial financing to companies and individuals in West Texas and Southern New Mexico. Alexandra has served as 2002 president of the El Paso Association of Mortgage Brokers, 2005 president of the El Paso Women’s’ Council of Builders. In 2011 she was Chairperson of the Board for the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. In 2012 she was named “Minority Small Business Champion of the Year” by the SBA’s El Paso, Texas office. In 2010, Alexandra and her mother incorporated Frontier 2000 Media Group to produce clean, wholesome, inspirational entertainment for families. She re-released “No Regrets” with a new foreword to the twentieth anniversary edition of the book updating readers on what her family is doing today. She is also co-author of “The Twelfth Juror”, “The Chosen,” which is the sequel to “The Planner,” and “The Fourth Kingdom”, which was selected as one of four finalists in the “Christianity Today” 2011 Christian Book Awards in the fiction category. She blogs regularly on the subjects of the Dodd-Frank bill and big government.

Joyce homeschooled her ten children from the first grade through master’s degrees. She is a well-known author and speaker on the subject of homeschooling. For nearly a decade she was a popular columnist for “Practical Homeschooling Magazine”. She now blogs regularly on parenting, homeschooling, and Christian lifestyle issues. Joyce and Alexandra have co-authored two other novels, “The Fourth Kingdom” and “The Twelfth Juror”, both of which were published in 2010. Joyce’s personal story of her experiences raising and educating her family is chronicled in “Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother”, published in February of 2011. Her novel, “The Warrior”, which tells the story of one woman’s ten year prayer vigil for a man she has never met, was released in May of 2012. She is also the author of two children’s books, “Tales of Pig Isle” and “The McAloons”, which began as stories that she told to entertain her grandchildren. Alexandra is author of “No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master’s Degree at Age Sixteen” and “Writing for Today.” She has been self-employed for over fourteen years and was the 2011 Chairwoman of the Board of the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. She writes a regular blog, Paying for Protection, about the consequences of over-regulation and over-reaching government.

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