Review Detail

At first glance, Eve isn’t a book that seems to have much going for it. It’s a packaged book for one thing, which tends to indicate that a book will be less than awesome. Carey’s chosen epigraph is a passage from The Handmaid's Tale, arguably the best piece of feminist dystopian fiction that exists. This is also yet another YA dystopian book that takes place in an inherently sexist society—women are used as disposable uteruses with no emotional needs. But somehow all those elements combined to create a book that was undeniably addicting. For whatever reason, I flew through Eve’s pages like a maniac.

This book is seriously well-written. Anna Carey’s prose may not be flashy or complicated or anything out of the ordinary, but it was engrossing. I didn’t actually care for Eve as a character too much, but the way her narration was written kept me engaged in the story right from the beginning. Even during the action scenes (I always skip those in books), I didn’t lose interest. Eve’s text had a fluid, steady pace that worked surprisingly well, and that is probably this book’s greatest strength.

Carey’s world-building was also well-handled. There wasn’t much of it it, but it was enough to satisfy me. I felt that, in a post-apocalyptic state, Eve’s version of America made sense and I had no unanswered questions in terms of what was what. Maybe the content itself wasn’t anything new, but I—for once—have found a dystopian novel that left me fully satisfied in terms of world-building. It’s rarer than you might think, in my case.

Even though Eve is narrated from the title character’s perspective, and even though I enjoyed her storyline, I’m not sure she was the best protagonist all around. For me, Eve was a bit flat and obvious. Similarly, her love interest, Caleb, was charming and nice, and I often caught myself smiling when he was part of a scene. But did he really have depth? On the other hand, Eve doesn’t try to be a serious and intense novel—I really didn’t get that impression. Yes, it deals with dark, tough subjects, but the author handles them with a brisk hand, focusing mostly on positive things. In that vein, it makes sense that Eve and Caleb, protagonists in a serious-yet-shallow dystopian world, would be congruently two-dimensional. And really, I wouldn’t even call them “two-dimensional” characters so much as “stock” characters. For myself, I liked both of them enough to become engaged in their lives and root for their happy ending.

Eve is an obvious book. It brings nothing new to the table, and it gave me nothing thought-provoking or earth-shattering. I was, however, massively entertained and addicted to this book. Maybe that style of dystopian won’t work for some readers—I really don’t think it will work for me a second time. This is a packaged book where the packagers seemed to have understood what they were doing, and I’m happy to have read this. I found very little wrong with this book, and I certainly had no major complaints.