Eve

Over winterbreak I read Eve by Anna Carey and I really wasn't all that enthused. I really just couldn't get over the premise of the book, it just didn't seem to make sense to me. Eve is set in a post-apocalyptic world where 98% of the world's population died of a deadly plague 16 years ago. Eve, the teenaged main character, is about to graduate from her all girl school for orphans, when she finds out that after you graduate from the school you become used for repopulating the world, continuasly birthing babiesfor the rest of your life. This is where I don't understand the premise. Assuming that the time this plague hit was around modern time, or further into the future, that means that there would still be about 140 million people left on the Earth, or more considering this is 16 years after said plague hit. Taking this into consideration, I don't understand why there would be such a dire need to repopulate that they were forcing girls against their will to breed. If anything, I would think they'd want to make sure everywhere was safe to live before they started filling up the Earth again, especially since there would be 6 billion some bodies lying around everywhere, which don't seem to be taken into account in this story.

As the story progresses Eve and another girl named Arden escape the school and eventually find their way into a refugee camp with the help of a boy named Cabel they meet on the road. Eve and Cabel fall in love of course and then something happens with a boy named Leif and Eve and Cabel have a fight which somehow leads to Eve being abducted by the government because apparently the King wants her to bear his children. If I may point out, none of this is really gone into much detail, or if it did, I didn't notice because the characters are extremely boring. I don't think there was a single real character trait for anyone, except maybe that Arden is cranky all the time. The only thing we know about Eve is that she has brown hair, and was the valedictorian at her school. I was really annoyed by this, because I really couldn't care less about what happened to Eve if I didn't know who she was at all.

The book ends with Eve finding Califia, which is a sanctuary for girls to live safely, and leaving Caleb behind, promising him that she'll see him again, along with a page long advertisement telling me not to miss the next book in the trilogy.

Needless to say, I won't be buying the sequel.