Children of Eden by Joey Graceffa

Children of Eden is a YA dystopian book about the aftermath of a global disaster. When Earth's global warming reached a breaking point, scientists figured out a way to make the atmosphere cooler. The problem was when the artificial atmosphere clashed with the sun's radiation, it released a cascade effect that wiped out almost all plants and animals. Luckily, Aaron Al-Baz designed EcoPanopticon, a computer program that hacked all technology and redirected it to healing Earth. The rest of humanity has to wait thousands of years in Eden before the robots can fix everything.

With limited resources, families are only allowed to have one child. Rowan is an illegal second child; her mother had twins. For sixteen years, she has been hidden away. She is more desperate than ever to see more of Eden, and recklessly escapes, resulting in a tragedy that puts her on the run.

I found the book tough to get into, mostly due to the lack of imagery and development. Instead of show and tell, Children of Eden was almost all tell and no show. Reading the book, I was hit with a ton of information at once. Reading in-between the lines was a lost cause, and all the holes in the plot did not help. The society is so complicated that a majority of the book is just explaining, which made it feel less eventful. I feel like the book was going in a lot of different directions. I think that the author tried to cram in too many ideas at once to wrap my head around. For this book to really be developed with all of his ideas, Children of Eden would have to be way longer.

The characters' development felt forced. They were whatever they needed to be in the moment. Instead of letting Rowan grow, she was molded into something different almost every chapter, which makes her feel dull and unrealistic to the readers. It also really bugged me that they made up new curse words, such as "bik." No other words changed, so it feels strange.

While there were some nice twists here and there, there is nothing super special or unique about this book. I really wanted to love it, but it was the nitty-gritty details that really jumped out. Because I looked at this from a reviewing standpoint, I found more things wrong than other people might.

However, I enjoyed the ending! I think the ending was the best part. Overall, Children of Eden got better the more I read it. Even though I had a lot of problems with Children of Eden, I did not hate it. I do want to know what happens next, so I will read the second book, Elites of Eden, which came out on October 3, 2017. (Besides, I believe in second chances.)

I do not recommend this book.

Title: Children of Eden
Author: Joey Graceffa
Publisher: Atria/Keywords Press
Pages: 278
Series: Yes, Book 1 of 2
Rating: 2 Stars
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