Ashley
Written on Jan 17, 2013
BookNook — Young Adult book reviews
Seeds of War is a tricky book to review. While I was still very interested in the overall idea, I felt like this book suffered from second-book-in-a-series syndrome. It was missing a strong, central, overarching conflict. It had a lot of mini conflicts, and a few half developed overall conflicts, but nothing was really strong and central. I think that made the book lose focus a bit.
Before I dive further into that, I'll talk about some of the things I liked. I really enjoyed learning more information about the famine and the government's involvement. Eden starts communicate with Diaspora II, and at one point they finally start asking some tough questions, like What the heck happened and how did the famine begin? In the first book I really starved for those little details, and in Seeds of War, we finally get some bits of information.
There were also some really sweet romance moments, but there are good things and bad things about the romance itself. At about the halfway mark, I was suddenly hit with a really sweet romance between Fi and Asher. The problem was that it practically didn't exist at all before this point, and then it really dwindled down after this point. I know that Fi and Asher were already dating when the book started, but I feel like their romance never really came into play in the first half of the book. They were just.. together. There was no sweetness, no fluff love stuff. Then it suddenly came at us full force for like ten pages, and I really enjoyed it. I just wish that could have been more integrated throughout the entire book. As a romance junkie, I think that would have made me like the book more overall.
Side note: there was a moment with unprotected sex that made me roll my eyes. Sometimes I just can't believe teenagers are that stupid. I know some of them are, but it just aggravates me.
The pacing at the beginning of the book was... really weird. Fi & Co. had to go on this huge six month long mission. They made a big deal out of it, and there was this whole sad moment about Fi having to leave her sister behind and say goodbye to her, and them all going on about how it'll be sooo dangerous. But those six months passed by in like 10-20 pages. I just felt like there was a huge build up, and I thought it was going to be a really central part of the book, and then it was just over in a quick breeze. I honestly think that entire part could have been cut from the book and just summarized as something that already happened between books one and two.
Seeds of War also had some religious points in it that I wasn't crazy about. I'm not a religious person and I don't love reading about it. The religion didn't dominate the book, but for a while I thought it was going to. It's connected to the "growing and unknown force" that's referenced to in the blurb, which is introduced as a group of religious extremists called the Truthers. Once we got passed the religious stuff, there was a cool new development involving the Truthers and my interest was really piqued, but then nothing really happened and I felt like the ball was dropped a little. There was no clear purpose to connect the characters to the Truthers, so for the most part I just saw them as existing independently of each other, with a few references here and there.
I was just never really sure where the book was headed. Fi & Co.'s mission was to start reconnecting the world by supplying settlers with radios and heirloom seeds, but there was no conflict there, and the lack of conflict kind of made me lose interest. The Truthers were causing trouble, but it was never enough trouble to make them truly intertwined with the plot.
I'm still pretty fascinated by the whole story and famine part of Seeds of War, but ultimately this book did feel like a bridge between the first book and the third book, where there will probably be some sort of showdown. The title of the book—Seeds of War—implies war, but we never actually see a war in this book. It is hinted that it will exist in the third book, but it makes me question why this book isn't called Reconnection instead, and the third book could be called Seeds of War. So for me, this book wasn't quite as good as Eden's Root, but I'm thinking the third book will probably be an improvement.