Eve by Anna Carey
My rating: 3/5 cats
well, this is very telling.
i came over here to write the review for this book, and realized i couldn’t find my copy of it. “no worries,” i thought, “i will just write the review from my recollections of the text without using any quotes or anything…”
crickets.
it’s not that i don’t have any memories of it—i do: innocence, arden, breeding, bear, radio, wild boys, freckles, pantry, bridge, love.
there. that’s a review, right?
the book is fine, it just suffers from being ONE MORE in an already crazy-long line of books just like it. and i think this is the kind of book elizabeth was talking about the other day when she said YA exhausts her because she is tired of reading another cheesy teen love story, just with different scenery. or something. she said it better—i forget where. i just went looking for it, and ended up getting distracted by new reviews and comments and then remembered—oh, yeah, i am supposed to be writing a book review.
so you see how into writing this review i am.
i thought it started out fine. (the book, not the review—that was a disaster from the get-go) i liked the premise even though i don’t totally buy the character: so eve has been sheltered in her girl-cocoon; friend to all, golden child, star pupil, ace reporter, and then just out of the clear blue sky, because some teen rebel tells her something shocking, yes, but something that goes against everything eve “knows,” she’s just gonna break one of the most fundamental rules of her society and go stumbling across the water even though she can’t even swim, putting herself in danger just on the strength of a quick convo with a chick she doesn’t even like? it just seems like someone indoctrinated into that world would be less investigative, you know?
but i guess that is part of what makes eve SPECIAL!
but she’s not. not really. i personally am tired of selfishness being passed off as naïveté. eve is not a heroine. she is the main protagonist, but she has no honor. so many people come to bad ends because of her actions, and she is just swanning through the wreckage, unscathed, in her revealing clothing cooing, “what are these boys and why are they all looking at me??”
backtrack. eve has been raised in an all-girl environment, been told that men are all horrible rapists and that once she gets her shiny education, she will go to the golden land and live a life of academic bliss and personal happiness. but that’s a lie, and after all the intensive schooling, all these girls are just going to be strapped to a bed and forced to make baby after baby for the brave new world.
wait—so why are they trained so well? it’s not as though these girls are going to be raising their babies and passing along this education, so no one is going to benefit from this schooling at all. seems a waste of time and resources.
so whatever—eve escapes, leaving behind her closest friends, not warning them that they are about to become baby-machines, hot on the heels of teen rebel arden who told her the truth in the first place. of course they are going to somehow meet up in the great wide world. and of course there are going to be boys.
so eve gets rescued from a bear (oooooh, cuddly!!) by a dreadlocked boy on a stallion, and he takes her back to his little lost boys enclave, where the younger boys crouch at her feet and learn how to read, and the older boys stifle their lust, with varying degrees of success.
because this is a YA novel, we will not be picky about the realty of this situation. dirty boys, living in the wilderness, with no former dealings with women are probably not going to be standing on ceremony here. i think it would have gotten uglier in a real-world situation.
but not here. here it is a relatively safe place where only one boy loses his self control and another boy gets to experience troo love.
and eve gets to ruin a few more lives.
later, she will do something else stupid (FOR LOOOOVE) and ruin a few more. irrevocably.
and we aren’t going to talk about how adaptable eve seems to be, from being told for 18 years that all men are bad to only showing a little bit of initial fear that is pretty quickly sloughed off as she takes charge and falls into insta-love.
but she has to keep running, because the king wants to put his own personal baby in her because she is the most beautiful and the most dumb.
and the ending. oh, dear. it is the most abrupt ending in the history of books. i am going to avoid spoilers but it’s like, “oh, wait, what?? really?? but i love you. oh, okay, whatever. see ya”
end book.
i know i kind of trashed the book here, but it is not the worst thing i have read. i was interested enough to keep reading, and the concept was good, if some of the world-building elements were far-fetched and counterintuitive. but it is fun and quick, and who needs plausibility, right?
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