Author: William Dietrich
Publisher: Burrows
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!
This rather juvenile novel begins with the narrator (yes, unfortunately it's yet another first person YA novel, because YA writers, particularly those in the US for reasons unknown, cannot at all handle third person) kayaking across a strait off the US north-west coast to an island where there's an old abandoned fort. The island is supposedly off limits - rendered that way by the US military because the old gun emplacements are unsafe.
Our narrator is writing a paper for high school, on old forts, and this is his excuse to sneak onto the island ♭ early ♪ one ♪ morning ♪ just as ♪ the sun♪ was rising... under cover of fog. As he does so, he info-dumps on his life, which is so tragic its boring. He's your standard trope YA under-privileged kid with few friends and little popularity who is no doubt about to become a superhero.
One of his reminisces concerns Andrea Martinez, and she's described as "...glossy hair, astonishing female architecture, teen queen smile, and 3.9 smarts..." I guess we should be thrilled that smarts even makes this list, but frankly it isn't much of a thrill. It's within the hands of writers to change these tropes and clichés. I can only ask once more why writers persist in their blanket refusal to do this. This isn't the only time, either, that I encountered this kind of thing in this particular novel. And yes, I know that teen thoughts often stray to such things. That doesn't mean that we have to go along with it and promote those thoughts. A main character in a novel should have something special about them - otherwise why do I want to read about them?
Nick goes inside the gun emplacement (it has bunkers underneath, and areas for munitions storage). He explores all of it, taking notes and photographs, and finally he discovers a metal plate on the floor, which eventually leads him to an area where he gets sucked horizontally along a tunnel, and loses consciousness. When he recovers, he's out in the open air, still on the island, and the fog is lifting. He shows absolutely no curiosity whatsoever about how this happened. He never returns to the bunker, not even to try and retrieve his phone and backpack. Instead, he goes back to the kayak and leaves the island!
This was completely unrealistic to me. It makes the main character look like an airhead at best, and a coward at worst. It's simply not conceivable that he wouldn't be the slightest bit curious, or that he wouldn't want to recover his stuff. But the story moves on, and starts moving quickly after that.
When Nick gets back to land, the village is deserted except for wild animals wandering around fearlessly. Suddenly, some creature - apelike, but more mean and aggressive - shows interest in him. Right that that point, a girl calls him by name and they escape the pursuit of this brutal creature on a motor launch. This girl doesn't even get the kind of description that Andrea did. She's simply, "A pretty girl...spiffy as a model...." Again, she's really of no interest except for her looks. This both saddened and irritated me.
Ellie - the girl, quickly transports Nick back to the Island he just left, where he meets an alien who quickly tells him that Earth is off track and he and Eleanor have been selected to get it back on the rails, otherwise it will have to be destroyed. They have to go back in time to do this. In short, it's bog-standard, boilerplate 1950's sci-fi!
In order to save Earth, we're told that E&N have to go backwards: they can't go to the future because it hasn't happened yet. This, of course, immediately makes a complete mockery of the time-travel claim the alien just made: that time loops and winds like a snarled fishing line - that it's like the board game Chutes and Ladders (in Britain that would be Snakes and Ladders). In short, it's nonsensical even within its own framework.
The plan is to send Ellie & Nick back to save the original Adam and Eve, and effectively reboot humanity. How this is supposed to work given that Ellie and Nick cannot possibly influence what happens over the fifty-thousand years of subsequent evolution and societal development, is yet another unexplained mystery in a novel that's evidently replete with them.
It's at this point that the author really screws up. He seems to be laboring under the creationist delusion that because scientists have 'identified' (but not really!) a genetic Adam and a similar Eve, that these two were the only two humans alive on the planet, and that they both lived at the same time and in the same place, about 50,000 years ago. This is patent nonsense. What's known as Y-chromosomal 'Adam' is estimated to have lived somewhere between ~140,000 and ~340,000 years ago. He was not the only person alive then. Neither is he the only person to leave descendants. Nor was he created ex nihilo - he had parents.
Mitochondrial 'Eve' is the female version of this 'Adam', traced through her mitochondrial DNA ('Adam' is traced via the 'Y' chromosome). Again, she was not the only woman alive back then, nor is she the only woman to leave descendants, and she also had parents, so this idea that there were the first two people, and all living people are descended from them is sheer nonsense. 'Eve' lived somewhere between 99,000 and 200,000 years ago, but the chances that both were alive at the same time are slim indeed, and the chances that they ever met are infinitesimally small.
This information is also subject to change dependent upon new genetic data being uncovered, as indeed happened in 2013 when a man was discovered who had a Y chromosome bearing genetic information which had not been mapped before. This alone would appear to push back the time of 'Adam' to long before the time of 'Eve'
Ellie & Nick next have to pass some tests, the nature of which is borrowed from the movie Cube wherein people find themselves in a cube with doors on all six walls, and have to figure out how to travel through from one cube to its neighbor without dying from booby traps.
The rooms here are much simpler, but nonetheless as frustrating and dangerous. The first requires strength, the second agility, and the third an intimate knowledge of the counter-intuitive so-called Monty Hall problem. None of this makes sense. Since the aliens have already chosen Ellie and Nick, why put them through this testing? What purpose does it serve? None that I could see.
Eventually the two of them wind up on the African savanna fifty thousand years ago, to carry out their mission to look for Adam and Eve and - if they think they're worth saving - hide them so that the Xu cannot come kill them. What?!! None of this makes any sense. I'd originally thought that the two were supposed to replace the originals, and I had all kinds of arguments about how ridiculous, dumb, and untenable that was, but this scheme makes even less sense!
These two are simply teenagers. They're untrained and unarmed, and not remotely dangerous, and they're supposed to not only survive out here, but also to find two humans in thousands, and speak their language, and DNA test them, and persuade these two Africans to come with these strange white folks and hide?! And what purpose will this serve? How will this improve the "human stock"?
But it's actually worse than this. The Xu are hunting Adam and Eve and will kill them if Ellie and Nick fail to find them and hide them. How is this any test of Adam and Eve? It isn't. It's nothing but a contest between the two modern teenagers, and the expert assassin aliens. In short, it's no contest at all, and even if E&N were to win, it would prove only that they got lucky or that they somehow managed to outsmart the aliens (which actually probably isn't that hard if the aliens are this stupid to begin with!).
It would say nothing about A&E, nor would it change history. It's completely absurd. The only way it could even hope to change anything is if the title proved out, and the original A&E were slain, leaving E&N to replace them, but even given this, it would have no effect, overall, on the next fifty thousand years of history. There would be no guarantee that the new A&E would eventually turn out to be the ones who pass their lineage down to modern times.
Ellie claims she received an education from the aliens prior to Nick's arrival, but she goes right on to prove that either this is a complete lie, or she's the worst student ever, neither of which options speaks very highly of her. She also claims she's a biology nerd who likes animals, (let's not get into the distinction between biology and zoology), but she doesn't grasp that it's a saber-tooth cat, not a saber-tooth tiger. Nor does she think for a second to warn Nick about crocodiles and other predators when they find a small creek to drink from - a creek that was so small that it was highly unlikely there would even be crocs and hippos there, but let's let that one slide right on by, shall we?
Neither of them think of heading upstream - away from the animals so they can a) avoid predators, and b) avoid the dirty water caused by the animals romping around, muddying the water, and urinating and defecating all over the place. Nick is just as bad. Right after they pass a skeleton - I mean immediately after - which sports bones of all shapes, sizes, and weights, just sitting there for the taking, they both agree that they need to find something to use as a weapon...! I was ready to ditch this after the incident at the creek, but I couldn't because I was really interested in finding out how hilarious their first interaction with other humans would turn out. I wasn't disappointed.
Having found a creek, instead of following it in the likelihood that they'd run into more humans, they leave it and head for the mountains. They don't seem to grasp that the creek must have inevitably sprung up from the mountains. These people are bone-headed and brain-dead stupid. When Nick is bitten by a snake, one of the locals finally shows up and saves his life. Ellie promptly names the black kid "Boy". Seriously? Could we be any more "southern states" if we tried?
When they meet the tribe, one of the males takes an interest in Ellie, and so Nick turns into a caveman and beats his face to a pulp - this is the guy who has been sent to rescue humanity from its violent future. What a total ass-hat. Yeah, start brawling over this girl because you're macho man lord and master, and she's jus' a po' weak lil thang who cain't perteck hersel'. It was at this point that I said "No more" and ditched this completely whack novel so I could move onto something better.
