BOOK REVIEW - AFTER EDEN by HELEN DOUGLAS - AFTER EDEN # 1 - YA SCI-FI - CONTEMPORARY SETTING - BLOOMSBURY AUSTRALIA

By: Helen Douglas

Published By: Bloomsbury Aust

Released: Available Now

Details: Paperback from publisher for honest review, 278 Pages

RATING: 3.75 RYAN STARS!

Blurb: Goodreads

Eden Anfield loves puzzles, so when mysterious new boy Ryan Westland shows up at her school she's hooked. On the face of it, he's a typical American teenager. So why doesn't he recognise pizza? And how come he hasn't heard of Hitler? What puzzles Eden the most, however, is the interest he's taking in her.

As Eden starts to fall in love with Ryan, she begins to unravel his secret. Her breakthrough comes one rainy afternoon when she stumbles across a book in Ryan's bedroom - a biography of her best friend - written over fifty years in the future. Confronting Ryan, she discovers that he is there with one unbelievably important purpose ... and she might just have destroyed his only chance of success.

BOOK REVIEW by Michelle:

This was a great start to the After Eden series for me. I enjoyed this YA, I will call it Sci-Fi genre but it is not a full on Sci-Fi it is in a contemporary setting, if I am making any sense. I am trying not to give spoilers.

Ryan Westland is the new kid at school and the girls love him. Connor is Eden’s best friend and he isn’t really digging the connection Eden and Ryan are having.

Although Eden and Connor are besties I didn’t really see it portrayed that much in this story. As the reader I am told they are, but they weren’t really showing me.

Eden is a pretty switched on chick. I commend her on her smarts. She puts some puzzle pieces together which I liked and worked out what was going on. She would give Thelma from Scooby Doo a run for her money.I really liked this. I sometimes hate being the reader who is thinking, come on chick you are not this daft.

Eden wasn’t. She gets straight to the point reasonably early on. I don’t think it helped much that Ryan was dropping pretty big hints, accidentally. I mean , dude, who doesn’t know what pizza is? Even if you don’t know and you are on a secret mission, ya gotta play it cool man. You dropped the ball a few times.

What I liked, was I was finding out about Ryan at the same time Eden was. I had my theories, but I liked that I wasn’t right. I went for a more obvious assumption.

I want to point out I hadn’t read the blurb when I decided to read this book. Almost all the time I choose not to read blurbs as I find they can give too much away and I like the element of surprise vs blurb spoilers. Goodreads has a tendency to give too much away with their blurbs too. I have to admit, the back cover blurb doesn’t give anything away on the book, but Goodreads does.

I thought Ryan could have been written better. He was nice. But I would have loved a little more oomph with his character. I wanted to believe why he was chosen for this mission.

I have a pet peeve with villains, or the bad guy in books of any genre where we as the reader are only given so many characters to choose from. You can easily eliminate them all bar one and I kind of hate that. How hard is it to throw in even a suspicious looking milkman? Well you get my drift. I want to have an Agatha Christie/Cluedo group of a couple extra characters for me to be wondering...’is this the baddie, or the one that has to do the clean up job, or is it him or her?’

I thought it was too obvious in this book and I thought that was a shame. Throw in the checkout operator who is being nosey, SOMEBODY other than the peeps you know it can’t be and the one person left over who happens to have told us the time of their arrival in a round-a-bout way.

I want that thrill of trying to work it out. I don’t want to be the first person yelling, BINGO!

I thought there was awesome opportunity for there to have been a lot more going on in the story line. Bring in some action. It pretty much is all in the last X amount of chapters.

It was a pretty big deal why Ryan had arrived, I thought he dropped the ball at a crucial time and Ben and Cassie, considering the immense importance of what they needed to prevent, they were...

Where?

Dudes!!

This was a life changing mission and you were ...where? 

Help a brother out.

Poor Eden got to look like a bit of a twat in front of Connor. I did laugh at how she reacted. I could see myself doing the same thing. Very Selena Gomez. 

I really liked the astronomy information coming into the story line. I thought that was cool. 

Without giving a spoiler, something happened at the end of this book, and I couldn’t help asking myself a rather obvious question. But I can’t say what it is, for spoiling. I’ll see if anyone else picks it. Something I thought Eden would ask and want to know about, in some detail.

Chasing Stars, # 2 in the series is releasing June 5th 2014. I am interested to read where Helen takes me after the ending to After Eden.

Michelle