2.5 stars
Sixteen year old Evangeline “Evie” Greene tells her story of woe and confusion to a creepy madman bent on chaining her in his basement dungeon. Before the apocalyptic Flash that destroyed the world as we know it, Evie was a rich and popular Southern Belle, with a dark secret. All summer, while her friends were off travelling the world, she was in an asylum, trying to suppress the horrific hallucinations and visions she suffered. Then the Flash hit and it turns out that all her horrible visions were just premonitions of what was to come.
In a world where most of the surface water evaporated in the course of one catastrophic event, after which most of the women in the world fell sick and died, Evie is one of very few females, and after her mother dies, she needs help and protection to get to her grandmother’s, whom she is convinced must still be alive. She turns to her former classmate, the Cajun badboy Jackson “Jack” Deveaux, one of the few people from her past who seems to have survived the apocalypse. He agrees to assist her, and as Evie can’t shoot, hunt or defend herself worth a damn, she needs all the help she can get.
Thank you for the shout out.
I am confused. If there is no Thunder Sex ™ what is the point of enduring all of the rest of Cole’s awfulness/silliness?
Morbid curiosity? Hoping that she may actually be able to write something else? Seriously, the prologue and the final 3-4 chapters were absolutely ace. The bits in between – not so much.
I do find she is good at the (not a euphemism) action as a rule.
I’ve steered clear of Cole’s YA fearing this would happen – she never struck me as somebody who could really make YO characters work. Just curious – what disaster kills off just the women? Was it some sort of uterine plague? Breast-eating bacteria? Also doesn’t it diminish the romance when the hero falls for the heroine when she’s literally one of the last women available?
“Yeah well…given the lack of living women I guess you’ll do!”
The Uterine Plague shall be my new sobriquet for the G.O.P.
It’s not made clear entirely what it is that makes the majority of women die. This would be one of the ways in which the worldbuilding = not so complex as one might like.
The “romance” is rubbish, but no, Jack “I’m constantly drunk on Jack Daniels” Devaux is pretty obsessed with Evie long before the apocalyps. He creepily watches her all the time, and tries to convince her that she’d rather hook up with him than her jock boyfriend, who she doesn’t actually seem all that into either. Of course, he thinks she’s a stuck up rich girl (he’s not entirely wrong) and she thinks he’s a rude and creepy Bayou lowlife (also, not actually wrong).
He does, however, at one point utter the lines: “Hell, Evie, you’re probably the last girl on earth for me. Would it kill you to put out?” This is after they’ve just shared their steamy first kiss, and he, our dashing hero, has charmingly assumed that Evie (still a virgin and not acutally all that experienced with men) immediately wants to move on from kissing to full on deflowering. Shortly after she quite naturally rejects him, he starts flirting wildly with one of the few other remaining girls in the world (another Arcana) to make her jealous. I suspect we’re supposed to invest in their romance, but I hope he dies horribly at some point.
Evie at least has bourgeoning Poison Ivy powers, which may counteract what a waste of space she was for much of the book. Jack is apparently good looking, has a stupid accent, can ride a motor bike and is good with a crossbow. These assets do not make up for his massive douchyness. I pretty much hate both of them, but it seems unlikely that Evie, our intrepid heroine, is going to kick the bucket. So my fingers are crossed that Jack is killed to make it all the more tragic.
Seriously, it’s the atmosphere, pretty cool premise and the supporting characters that are the reason this book got as high a rating as it did. I hope the next book is better – personifications of Death tend to be cool.
It sounds like such an intriguing premise but I’m so tired of whiny helpless damsel in distress heroines. I also hate when a mediocre or subpar book suddenly has an amazing ending – it makes it so hard to decide whether or it to give up on the series or continue (that was basically my response to the ending of The Maze Runner).
If I hadn’t actually paid money for the e-book (luckily I got it on sale, so it was way cheap), I doubt I would have powered through it to the end. Then again, the end is what made it a bit more bearable. I will give the sequel a try (I may have acquired that through somewhat shady means), but if all the characters are as insufferable as in this, and Cole tries to convince me that I should stay invested in Evie and Jack’s unconvincing and bad romance, I’m done. I suspect I’ll still finish the book though, as I ind writing bitter and snarky reviews cathartic.