Well I certainly enjoyed this read for reasons I’ve never enjoyed a book before. In fact, I’m having trouble articulating just what it was that I enjoyed. It wasn’t what I expected. HarperCollins cranked this little sucker off the press, on shelves October the fourth, for anyone interested.

We start out in a post-apocalyptic world where 99% of America got wiped out by some plague in the past. Little Eve is valedictorian at a school for girls:

It had been over a decade since any of us had seen a boy or man, unless you counted the photos of the King that were displayed in the main hall.

America’s run by a new King who wants all of the girls trained up, educated and perfected in every way. When they graduate from one of these schools, they cross over the river to an all-brick building where they learn a trade.

I’d spent hours at the piano, learning Mozart and Beethoven, always with that building off in the distance—the ultimate goal.

But when her arch rival sneaks out of the compound one day, challenging Eve’s assumptions, Eve starts to question everything she’s ever known:

“Wake up!” she hissed. “You think you’re going to learn a trade?” She gestured to the brick building on the other side of the lake. I could barely see it in the growing darkness. “Don’t you ever wonder why the Graduates never come outside? Or why there’s a separate gate for them? Or why there are no windows? You think they’re sending you in there to paint?”

With this, Eve must choose between giving her speech at graduation or running away from the evils her rival warned her about. She finds a world completely different from what she dreamed it would be, filled with unexpected places, experiences and, of course, men.

For those reading or writing YA or who have teenagers, this book is edgy enough to keep their attention (especially the girls – it is, after all, girly) without crossing every boundary you, as a parent, try to uphold.

For those reading or writing post-apocalyptic, you need to get ahold of this book. It does things with the genre that I, until now, have never seen. If you value familiarity with your genre, you need to see what Carey does with women in a post-apocalyptic world.

For those interested in romance, this out-of-the-garden into-the-world quest retraces the faint memory we all have of the first time we fell in love.

The Adamic/Even symbolism and the various corruptions of both genders paint bleak and hope-filled portraits on this post-apocalyptic landscape. Eve pushes men to wrestle with both extremes of passivity and abuse while asking women to see themselves neither as mere carriers of fetuses nor as jack-of-all-trades warrior princesses, but as partners in the happiness of true love. Anyone reading this will be challenged while being entertained.

Carey employs fantastic description:

The old Finding Nemo cards were faded and ripped, some stuck together with dried fig juice.

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the sky: a blue, boundless thing that was so much bigger than I had ever imagined.

I had sat in my Dangers of Boys and Men class for an entire year, learning all the ways women were vulnerable to the other sex. First was the Manipulation and Heartache unity. We did a close reading of Romeo and Juliet, studying the way Romeo seduced Juliet and ultimately led her to her death…. During the unit on Domestic Enslavement, we saw old print ads of women in aprons. But the lesson on Gang Mentality was the most terrifying of all.

Fatigue was chasing me.

The smoke billowed up to the ceiling and spread outward, teasing my nostrils with the promise of a meat dinner.

The next afternoon I followed Arden through a field of sunflowers, pushing the giant black-eyed monsters away from my face.

I could go on for another thousand words giving you endless examples of her wonderful use of description and her word-weaving that immerses me into her story. Through this, and through the original concept of the novel, she sold me her story snare, rope and tree branch.

I did, however, find a handful of thorns among the roses…

First, it had many “redemptive” violence scenes, several as a means for deus ex machina. I’m okay with violence in a novel. That might sound weird coming from a peacemaker, but I really do think there’s a difference between violence in a story and violence in real life. For instance, Slumdog millionaire extracts a two-goat theme, the imagery of surrogates, in the ending. The Book of Eli uses violence as a sort of prophetic judgment upon unadulterated evil. Violence, if it’s symbolic, never really means “go be violent.” However, if the violence serves little purpose save but to increase tension, it’s mere violence for violence’s sake. That was the case in many scenes in Eve. There is one gorgeous exception to this critique that develops the characters more than any other moment in the story, but other than the one, I found the violence just… there.

Second, you’ve heard of plot-dumps (Dumbledore), dialog dumps (Gilmore Girls), and description dumps (it was a dark and stormy night & 19^th century Brit lit). I’m introducing the “quirk dump.” When a character needs development, but the author gets lazy in showing his/her quirks over time, they dump the quirks like this:

I took the pair of pants I had from our exercises, and the silk pouch of my favorite things. It contained a tiny plastic bird I’d found years ago while digging in the mud. A gold wrapper from the first sucking candy Headmistress had ever given me; the small, tarnished silver bracelet saved from when I’d arrived at school at five; and finally the only letter I had from my mother, the paper yellow and tearing at every crease.

Again, decent description. Poor showing. This comes up only one other time, and though it’s during a climactic scene and delivered with catharsis, I cared much less than I should have. I would have much rather learned about the plastic bird, the gold wrapper, the silver bracelet and ESPECIALLY the letter from mom over the slow course of the narration rather than this rushed, pick-up-everything-I-own paragraph. This is quirk-dumping, and I’m attached to none of it when I read this. Stop telling me why your character’s different than any other and show me. Eve rocks as a main character. Let her rock on.

Third, there were some copyediting mistakes. I realize it’s not the final final final draft, but we’re two months out from the release date. That’s not your fault, Anna, so much as HarperCollins’.

Fourth, a couple of times she ran out of words and grew repetitive, sometimes even predictable. This made the writing distracting which in turn yanked me out of the story at three separate points.

Despite those four discrepancies, I did enjoy the novel. I’m giving it a flat 4.0 out of five (a four on Goodreads) for originality in its class, for fantastic description and for keeping my interest without grossing me out, a hard task in post-apocalyptic. Apparently it’s the start of a trilogy…

Fantastic job, Anna.

I learned four new words from this one, but could only find one of them in my stack of papers. Sorry to skimp on the literating this week, gang. I’ll make it up to you next time:

• pirouette – (cheifly Ballet) an act of spinning on one foot, typically with the raised foot touching the knee of the supporting leg