It took me awhile to pick up this book. I kept seeing it on amazon.com, and it seemed interesting. I shied away from it initially because I was feeling a little burned out on dystopian and/or armageddon stories. I was coming off the Hunger Games, Divergent, The Passage, etc., so I waited. When I saw that I could borrow the book (and the rest of the trilogy) for free through Amazon’s Kindle Lending Library, I figured I’d give it a try. I am very cautiously optimistic.

Maybe I should’ve know that the end of the world would involve some sort of (slight spoiler) alien/spider/mutated human thingy, but I was definitely not prepared for it. The book began slowly, and a bit tedious. It was funny that I started this book while sitting in the waiting room of my dentist, and Emily (our protagonist) started the story in a doctor’s waiting room. Ha!

I became irritated and somewhat impatient with the step by step, detailed description of the normal things Emily did. This was a recurring irritation for me throughout the book. I mean, do you really need to tell me how she took out her laptop, booted up her computer and checked her email? I did that in  about 13 words, the  author took a good two paragraphs. This happened at later points in the story as well. I wanted to scream “I know that!!”.  At one point I just said out loud “too many words!”.  This style made the story drag a bit, and it seemed to take forever for the action to start. Things did pick up towards the end, but it was  a bit of a slog to get there. It certainly didn’t go in the direction I thought it would (I may not have read the book at all if I had know of certain developments), but I think that’s a good thing. I felt the same way about The Passage by Justin Cronin, and I ended up liking it.

The protagonist, Emily Baxter, was a tough nut to crack for me. Even after I’ve finished the book, I don’t feel like I know her. I won’t get into too much detail, but I never really knew what she was going to do, or have some idea of how she would react to different situations, even though we are inside her head. I don’t really know her personality. She’s a bit all over the place. Maybe the author was going for an “every woman” type, but Emily ended up not really being any “type” at all. But perhaps for some people that’s a positive.

In the end, I do think I will continue with the series. It picked up enough by the last third for me to at least want to know where the plot will take me next.  This book is definitely a set up for the rest of the trilogy. I get the feeling that this may have been a rough start to an interesting series.

LilyPad Rating:   out of 5