Review: Great ideas but not fleshed out enough for me
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 21, 2014
*I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.*CAUTION: SOME SPOILERS (marked in <spoiler> tags)I'm a sucker for any sort of post apocalyptic romance, so the blurb for this made me think it would be right up my ally. I liked a lot of the ideas behind the book. Humanity fleeing Earth after destroying the planet isn't really a new idea, but I thought the idea of Overgrowth was really interesting - people actually being proactive about trying to fix the planet's ecosystem. I also thought it was interesting that the humans who left didn't just leave everyone else on the planet to fend for themselves - they have food and water stores that are supposed to last them until they die out (of inability to reproduce after being exposed to radiation, another interesting idea). So the remains of humanity in this book was a lot more civilized than I would usually expect from this sort of set up.There were some little details in the world building that bothered me though. People seem to still use money and Daniel seems to have a lot of it. How? It didn't seem like he was really getting paid doing his job as historian. I also wanted more details about the war that caused the destruction of the planet, I wasn't really clear on exactly what had happened and how people had managed to survive the radiation at all. I was also curious about how the computer worked and how they still had power, especially if the forest was taking over everything outside of the city. Also what happened to Aldric's throat? Was it injured in the same way as his arm? I was never clear on that either.What really didn't work for me in this book was the romance. I never felt anything between Aldric and Daniel. I  felt like they only had sex because they had limited other options. <spoiler>Daniel spends most of the book hung up on his ex, and I thought that was dismissed way too quickly. Aldric spends most of the book thinking that Daniel only wants him as a bodyguard or for his memories. The book just didn't make me feel anything in regards to their relationship. I couldn't have cared less if Aldric had decided to leave at the end of the book</spoiler>. Also I didn't actually like Daniel very much - the book is from Aldric's point of view, and I never got what he saw in Daniel. I felt like the romance was tacked on because the book was supposed to be a romance - it was supposed to be a romance, wasn't it? It felt like it was a box that needed to be checked, rather than an important or even necessary part of the story. (Also, side note, saliva is totally not sexy to me. The phrase "saliva dripping from his mouth" was used twice, and not even in the context of blow jobs!)I thought the plot wasn't quite fleshed out enough. I kept waiting for things to come together, but it never really did. Part of the problem was that there wasn't enough time for me to care about the characters. <spoiler>When the women at the restaurant are murdered, I probably should have felt sad, but they'd only shown up for one scene so I wasn't really very attached to them, so the book lost the emotional impact that that entire development should have had</spoiler>. I thought the role of the villain was really interesting, but also not quite developed enough. <spoiler>I thought Daniel's ex's theory that maybe humanity would survive if they just went back to early human history and survival of the fittest and all that was really interesting. And then it was interesting how he got twisted in desperation to resort to killing people</spoiler>. But all of that was brought in really late in the book and then over very quickly and almost completely forgotten about.Overall I think the book would have been better if it was longer. Great ideas, but they just weren't developed enough for me.