The Bane (Eden Trilogy, #1)

by Keary Taylor

[violetpeanut]

The Bane was an entertaining read with great world-building and exciting action scenes. Unfortunately, it was also somewhat predictable, not entirely original and lacked character development.

As I was reading, I was thoroughly entertained. I read the book over the course of about 24 hours and there were parts where I just could not put it down. The action scenes between Eve and The Bane were well done. They were exciting and had me riveted. I felt like I could really envision the bullets flying. I felt the same way about the world-building. The author basically describes a post-apocalyptic world where people are forced to hide in small communities and live off the land and whatever they can scavenge. I really felt like I could envision their camp, their garden and, later, the hospital.

As I read, however, I felt a strange sense of deja vu. After mulling it over a little but, I realized that different aspects of the story mimic things that I had already read. There are parallels to the early scenes in [b:The Hunger Games|2767052|The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games #1)|Suzanne Collins|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1358275334s/2767052.jpg|2792775], Melanie in [b:The Host|1656001|The Host (The Host, #1)|Stephenie Meyer|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1318009171s/1656001.jpg|3328799], plot points of [b:Breathe|11544466|Breathe (Breathe, #1)|Sarah Crossan|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1330286837s/11544466.jpg|16484181] and a few others. I don't mean to imply that anything is plagiarized - it's not. There are just a lot of similarities between The Bane and works already published by other authors.

There is a love triangle in this book. I know many of you hate love triangles. Here, I didn't mind it so much. It was a major plot point, but instead of being there just for the sake of romance and sexual tension, it was really there to show how messed up Eve is in dealing with her emotions - or lack thereof.

And that brings me to the characters. My biggest problem with this book is a lack of character development. The main character, Eve, is really the only character who we see develop in any significant way. Avian, West and all of the other characters are pretty much one-dimensional. Apparently this is going to be a trilogy and based on the ending, I suspect that Avian and West will be more fully developed as the series continues.

Despite the lack of originality and character development, I had a good time with this one. I would recommend it to fans of sci-fi (especially involving AI or robots), fans of zombies (as The Bane have a lot of similarities to zombies), fans of dystopia, and fans of any of the books I mentioned above.