Review: After the End

After the End
Author:  Amy Plum

Publication Date:  May 6th 2014  

~A copy was provided by HarperTeen and Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review~

------------------------------------------------------------------------

She’s searching for answers to her past. They’re hunting her to save their future.

World War III has left the world ravaged by nuclear radiation. A lucky few escaped to the Alaskan wilderness. They've survived for the last thirty years by living off the land, being one with nature, and hiding from whoever else might still be out there.

At least, this is what Juneau has been told her entire life.

When Juneau returns from a hunting trip to discover that everyone in her clan has vanished, she sets off to find them. Leaving the boundaries of their land for the very first time, she learns something horrifying: There never was a war. Cities were never destroyed. The world is intact. Everything was a lie.

Now Juneau is adrift in a modern-day world she never knew existed. But while she's trying to find a way to rescue her friends and family, someone else is looking for her. Someone who knows the extraordinary truth about the secrets of her past.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

After The End was an average read for me, which is so disappointing because I enjoyed the Revenant series and was so looking forward to something new from Amy Plum. With the synopsis, and what you think is a pretty interesting one, and what I thought would end up being a good conspiracy story ended up being like a homeopathic 101. 

It also felt like a novella leading up to the actual novel because there's little plot it in this one, and another recent one I've read I said the exact same thing which is my problem with series' lately. The first book always seems to be a layout for the series, and while sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes it's a bad thing because it results in a boring book.

While the story did pick up after 30% and got a little more interesting I was still bored and just felt like I was waiting for something that never happened, and if I'm honest, you really don't even know what the whole thing is about- even up until the end you still don't really get the bigger picture, and that's what annoyed me most about it.

The characters got better as they go along, and being written in first person and duo point of views from Juneau and Miles helped a lot to keep me reading. They're great characters. A little silted in the beginning, but like I said, they get better as they go along and I began to like them a lot more than I did as I got to know them. Like I said a million times, characters make or break a book, and these ones did make it. Juneau's been lied to her whole life  and at first she doesn't even know it, so she has to come to terms that the people she's grown up with, the people who have guided her have lied. She's finding her new feet and she's pretty hilarious when she wants to be. And she's smart, she knows how to take care of herself, she doesn't need saving nor does she expect anyone to save her.

Miles is more...human. I guess you could say. He's the douche of every high school, he creates trouble and gets in trouble, and when asked he doesn't know why. Well, here's why, he's just  vying for his father's attention.  He's less likable but more realistic, he thinks Juneau's crazy when he meets her, when she tells him things. Which would be anyone's first reaction, but what annoyed me the most was that there was no progression with him until suddenly he believed. He was pretty damn adamant and then suddenly just not...

The romance was not my favourite, and again, there was no progression with that. There wasn't really a connection either, well, I didn't feel or see the connection. Yes, there's some banter and between them they are pretty funny but when the romance started making an appearance it was all kind of sudden and I just didn't get it.

Overall I'm disappointed, and I'm not sure whether I'll continue with the series, so I guess the next one will decide that for me.

After The End while overall disappointing, I did enjoy the Yara aspects and learning about the way of Juneau's clan lived and I suspect a lot of Amy Plum's fans from the Revenant series will love it.

 

Rating: 2.5/5