A review by trid_for_kicks
Eve by Anna Carey

2.0

READING: Eve, by Anna Carey

This book started off promising: it was an interesting concept, and I liked the main character in the beginning. I mean, she was always an A+ student, perfectly obedient, but then goes against everything she knows in order to discover the truth of her world. And then, she does the bravest thing of all, and flees, even though she doesn't know anything about how to survive outside the walls of her school.

But then it goes downhill from there.

Spoiler

The way the author sets up the world, where all the girls are trained and brainwashed to fear and hate men. Based on how she behaves around Pip and Arden, I assumed that there would be some kind of love triangle--I mean, girls get hormones, too, and when there are, A, no men, and B, you're supposed to hate men, then teenage girls would at least experiment. I mean, just look at women's prisons. Anyway, then they drop Gary Stu in the mix, and you can tell immediately that this is the person that Eve is supposed to fall in love with, and it's very carefully orchestrated from there on. We find out that Eve is being hunted by the King, because he wants to rape her so that he can have an heir to his throne, and apparently she's the best candidate because she's smart and perfectly obedient--but wait, she ran away, so I guess she's only got one of the two things that he wanted her for, but for some reason he's still hunting her. Huh. Eventually, they end up at his camp, the dugout (and can I say how annoying it is that Eve is CONSTANTLY referring to the walls as "mud" instead of "dirt"--mud means it's slimy and wet, unstable. If it was all mud, then the caves wouldn't hold together. And one certainly wouldn't want to be touching them or leaning up against them, as everybody seems to be doing. I mean, this is being really nit-picky I know, but sometimes stuff like that just gets under my skin) Then, for some reason, they go to raid the soldiers' camp, and then they STAY THE NIGHT, like there's no possibility that the armed men would come back and find them curled up in their sugar comas. Anyway, then the leader of their group tries to (and possibly succeeds? it wasn't made clear) to rape her, and that, for some reason, makes Gary Stu leave, angrily, and makes Eve sad. This is the point where I gave up on the whole thing, and skimmed the rest of the book. So, apparently Eve and Arden get sold to some slimy guy, and they, and another girl named Lark, escape somehow. They end up with a nice couple who take care of them, until Eve decides to blow their cover and send a not-so-encrypted message to try and tell Gary Stu to come find her, never mind he just took off when she answered in confusion over whether or not she was just raped by his buddy. If she was going to send a message, she should have gotten help from the nice couple: they would have told her the new code (because, come on, of course the bad guys would be trying to catch them, and they would notice the broadcasts, and if a young kid with very little education can decode it, then they sure as HECK can, so obviously the good guys would be making a new code all the time). The nice couple gets killed, along with the new girl they picked up along the way, and then Arden sacrifices herself so Eve could get away. Eve wanders in the wilderness, Gary Stu finds her, they hijack a car, and drive the rest of the way to the safe haven, only to find out that men aren't allowed in there, and Gary Stu knew this all along, so he says "bye, Eve!" and she goes with them.

COME ON.

TL:DR? I didn't like the book.

This story had so much potential: the whole situation with brainwashing young girls to have them reproduce and rebuild the population? Pretty crazy. And them being isolated, and girls being rarer than boys because all the girls died--we could go somewhere with this.

But then you start thinking about this dystopia, and it just doesn't work. Apparently, the king has young boys under the age of like, sixteen, doing construction for the whole city. And young girls, also about that age, being the "sows" or mothers for the entire civilization. Okay, um, so, you'll basically kill off all the boys from hard physical labor, and then you kill off the babies that the girls are giving birth to, because they're so traumatized, that something just HAS to go wrong with the pregnancy. If you're going to brainwash these girls their whole life, then have them basically just be baby makers, why not brainwash them to BE baby makers? Why tell them they were going to live in the city with the grown ups and do cool and fun things? If they know they're going to be baby makers when they grow up, and they're taught that that's what they want, then it's a pretty good chance that things will go a lot better.

Anyway, I know a lot of people died, but you would think that at least some of the grown ups would be doing some of this work, building stuff, making babies. This whole civilization is about two or three years from total collapse, and the possible extinction of the human race. But no biggie. We'll let the seven year old boys clean up the mess.

Oh, wait, no, they're dead.