Review: Surprisingly good but a little off.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 5, 2011
This was a very good debut novel from new direct-to-digital novelist Maia Underwood. I really enjoyed the concept of a disastrous future environment. Underwood imagines an America after an event has happened "The Crash" which basically was a financial failure."... the global economy had crumbled, forcing the closure of many industrial... giants; and bringing the essential transportation and distribution of goods to a grinding halt. ... the old way of life began to disintegrate... global anarchy took root.... (2%)."It is in this environment that young Selena was raised, living with her parents on the run. Lucky for her, her mother was a nurse and her father an anthropologist, so she was able to learn survival skills from them, including becoming a leatherworker. After her parents have passed, Selena lives like a ghost in the shadows, deftly avoiding human contact. In the time of anarchy, other humans are a threat, not only because they would rob her, but could also threaten her virtue.Eventually she runs into Dan... the son of a Special Forces Unit Military Officer who "convinces" the young lady to come with him and join a small hidden community of nice humans who have banded together. Selena has been far too long without human contact and it takes her time to learn to grapple with the struggles of living with others but she eventually finds her place.As much as I enjoyed this novel... I'd say it was only good (not great) because it was marketed as a romance and it just wasn't very romantic. There is absolutely no POV from Dan, the hero, and the story is almost entirely from the perspective of Selena. Dan is silent and unreadable and for the most of the novel, since we're not told what he's thinking even from his inner dialogue, there is little to no interaction between the two characters. At the point that the heroine provoked the hero into chasing her (which is all they do... she runs, he chases... the one time he doesn't chase she's disappointed...) anyway, by the time the love scene comes I wasn't convinced the two had fallen in love or why. They'd literally exchanged only a few sentences to each other. Literally. I was also disappointed that the heroine said "no" and "i hate you" to the hero when they made love. Not very romantic. After this love scene, they resort back to having little interaction with each other until the end.Beyond that, I kept wondering where all the humans had gone. The Crash doesn't explain why there is mass loss of life. This novel read as though there had been a nuclear fallout or a plague or something... leaving only remnant humans to and large cities completely abandoned. The only explanation is that humans died off because they were so dumb... when the cans and food ran out in the stores after being ransacked, they just didn't know what to do. Somehow this just didn't seem right to me. The whole explanation for The Crash just seemed a little flimsy. Financial global failure? Hmmmm.But overall, the story was good and the price was right.Love scenes: 2Environment: American Southwest/ Future/ ApocalypticStory Themes: Tortured heroine, tortured hero, kidnapping, rescue, love/hate relationship, survival