When Dr. Elliott Drake wakes from a mysterious fifty-year sleep, the world as he knew it is gone. Cities are now desolate, and civilization is controlled by deadly immortals. Stranger still is Elliott's extraordinary new "gift"--he has the power to heal, but it comes with fatal consequences.
A woman with a past . . .
Jade barely escaped the immortals and is now hell-bent on revenge. She trusts no one . . . until Elliott. His piercing gaze and tempting touch shatter her defenses, but the handsome doctor seems to have dangerous secrets of his own. Is it safe to trust him with her heart?
If they are to survive in this dark new world, Jade and Elliott must work together to fight the forces that take them beyond danger.
Beyond desire.
Comment: I had this book in the shelf since 2010. The old saying that later is better than never did have its meaning here, because this happened to be one of those books I now regret I had not read sooner, for I was positively surprised by how much I ended up liking it.
Dr Elliott Drake wakes up one day, along with a group of friends, in a cave in Sedona, after some hiking. He can't remember why he was asleep, but the biggest shock comes when they leave the cave and everything around them is different. They realize, with time, that something happened to the world and somehow they have been sleeping for fifty years. Now that they have been trying to understand what happened, they hope to find someone who was alive back then, so they can have answers. They also have to learn who to trust and who is out to get them...
In this novel we meet a group of people who now must deal with significant changes to the world around them. Most of the population has died, but there are still survivors out there, even though there are also weird beings who prey on humans to kill them. As Elliott's group meet others and discuss plans on what to do to survive and to gather information, they are told someone is behind all this and it seems that the Strangers, some human-like characters with weird crystals on their chests, are the ones in control.
I must say I was immediately captivated by this world. I have not watched a single episode of The Walking Dead, despite the hype about it, because I just don't find any particular interest in post apocalyptic worlds (nor in violent ones), but I have successfully read the Scorpius Syndrome series by Rebecca Zanetti, and actually liked the books a lot. The romance content certainly helped, as it did here, even though I will agree with the readers who said the romance was almost too secondary, considering the mysterious but engaging world building the author invented.
In fact, that is where my delight over the novel is focused because I think the author managed (with some flaws. but who cares) to create a scenario that wasn't obvious, that has an enemy to deal with, but in which the attention seemed to be on the characters thinking about what had changed, and dealing with new discoveries, without making this only a story about people reluctantly defeating the bad guys. So many fantasy/PNR books are like this...
In this world, something big happened to cause earthquakes and natural disasters and many people died. Then the zombie-like characters arrived and that is an extra challenge. I think that once one gets to end of the novel and sees where this might be going, it can become really clever or really silly, depending on one's POV, and I cannot know how far the author will take things unless I read the next book and so on, but thinking on this one, I think it was a very ingenious way of presenting a situation that is still so hard to explain. The idea of centering the doubts and the lack of knowledge on characters who had been "asleep" in an unnatural way was both well chosen and frustrating, but I'm eager to know more about this detail.
The plot itself wasn't too complex, basically the characters need to accomplish tasks, they need to protects themselves, later on they have to "rescue" a few characters in danger... nothing too far from the usual type of story we would find in the genre. The main characters are also developed accordingly, which is to say that they have the natural worries about what is happening, about how to live in a world where everything is different. Thankfully, they did some investigation, as and they learned things, it became "fun" do find out things as they did, namely about the mysteries which seemed to be too random to have specific connections (but some did, obviously).
The romance between Elliott and Jade, a character that helps them defeating the zombies in the beginning, was cute and all, but I would not say it was one of those things that reaches the stars or anything. I was happy for them, and that they found each other, but the relationship itself wan't as romantic nor was the evolution of it anything out of the ordinary, in my opinion. It does seem clear that other pairings will be matched and one or two characters did make me curious, though.
No comments:
Post a Comment