Review: Eden

Eve knew the stories of the Fall, of a time before she wandered into the colony of Eden, unable to recall anything but her name. She’s seen the aftermath of the technology that infused human DNA with cybernetic matter, able to grow new organs and limbs, how it evolved out of control. The machine took over and the soul vanished. A world quickly losing its humanity isn’t just a story to her though. At eighteen, this world is Eve’s reality. In their Fallen world, love feels like a selfish luxury, but not understanding what it is makes it difficult to choose between West, who makes her feel alive but keeps too many secrets, and Avian, who has always been there for her, but is seven years her senior. The technology wants to spread and it won’t stop until there is no new flesh to assimilate. With only two percent of the human population left, mankind is on the brink of extinction. While fighting to keep Eden alive, Eve will discover that being human is about what you will do for those you love, not what your insides may be made of. And even if it gets you killed, love is always what separates them from the Fallen.

Taylor took the popular post-apocalyptic theme and gave it a good spin. It had a bit of a zombie apocalypse vibe... only instead of a zombie virus raising the dead it was nanobots turning people into cyborgs. The bright side of the lack of actual zombies was that the cyborgs weren't so "grr, arg, lets ineffectually eat people." Even though they were a tad slow on the uptake, the cyborgs could actually think and do things other than walk around biting people. They had an understandable directive: turn humans into cyborgs by infecting them. And they could kind of

The plot was well constructed and made Eden hard to put down, but, honestly, it would have been better off without Eve... the main character. She rehashed everything to death, and she flip flopped between West and Avian to the point where I just wanted her to shut up and pick one. Also, she started out as a solid believable lead, but then her character did an instantaneous 180 and even though she was still a solid lead the transformation wasn't buyable and I couldn't get behind it.

Eve was a lot like Cameron from Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles. In the first episode Cameron seemed like a completely normal high school girl, but in all of the subsequent episodes, once we've learned she is in fact a terminator, she's a total cyborg. Like with Cameron, I liked both sides of Eve, but I spent the rest of the book wondering where the first Eve went and why she was ever there in the first place.

The bottom line is that this is one of those books that's perfect for some readers and really not for others, but the only way to know is to try it.

-Aaron