Sunday, May 11, 2014

Review: End Times by Anna Schumacher

First, thanks to both Edelweiss and Razorbill for allowing me to read an e-galley of this title.  The premise sounded really good, as well as it definitely had a pretty neat looking cover.  While I liked the main story of the book, I had some issues with it.  But first let me tell you what it was about.

We kind of have 2 main characters, although there is a 3rd that we also get a point of view from in some of the chapters.  First we have Daphne.  Daphne has just finished a case where she had been accused of murdering her stepfather.  However the court realized, the truth was that she killed him in self defense as he went to rape her at knife-point.  She was able to get the knife away from him and stab him.  Unfortunately her mother doesn't believe the things that Daphne tells her about her husband, and so Daphne chooses to leave and go live with her Aunt and Uncle in Carbon County.  While they were never wealthy, she could always feel the love when she went there.  She doesn't tell them about the whole court case, figures it would only cause problems to start out like that.  Once she gets there, she finds her cousin Janie is pregnant.  We get some of the chapters from Janie's point of view, and while she is a major character, I feel like she's still a bit different from Daphne, and Owen, the other main character.  But Janie is important.  Her boyfriend, Doug, is kind of jerk.  Violent, and even tries to come on to Daphne when she first arrives.  He's pretty much a sleazy guy, and Janie is pretty nice from what we read.  She so deserves better.  Now, Janie's family is pretty religious.  So much that Janie believes she is meant to have the baby, that it is a blessing.  And so it is really interesting that when Daphne arrives in town there is a strange sound of trumpets, but no one knows where it is coming from.  So now people think maybe Daphne is something special.  And then, when her uncle calls out a geologist to where he thinks he has oil, she gets mad when the geologist is rude to her uncle.  So she grabs the dipstick out of the geologist's truck and sticks it in the ground where her uncle had said he thought there was oil.  And when she pulled it back out, there was oil there.  Now her aunt and uncle, who were so poor, her uncle out of work, living in a trailer, will be rich.  But her uncle, ever the religious man, wants to use the money to get the town back on its feet, before spending any of it on his own family.

Owen is the other main character.  He is a dirt-bike rider, a very good one, traveling around the country winning all kinds of competitions.  But he has more of a goal than just winning these and going professional circuit, he is looking for his past.  All he knows is that he was born on a commune of the Children of the Earth.  And in one town, he gets a hit.  Someone has heard that it used to be nearby, and there is a girl named Luna that also came from there.  He meets Luna. She has the same unique eyes as Owen, and is having the same dreams he has been having.  They leave together to try to find where the dreams are taking them.  And they end up in Carbon County.

All the characters' lives will connect, and it will all lead to a prophecy of the end times possibly coming true.

Like I said, the story is pretty good, I love the idea behind it.  But I had some problems with maybe how things were or maybe weren't really described?  I don't know how to say it.  It was a good read.  I wanted to know what was going to happen.  But it wasn't the best of this type of story I've ever read.  Just something about it.  By the end I was definitely involved with the characters and wanting to know what parts of the prophecy were going to happen, and how.  And I will be anxious to see what part Janie plays as the book continues in a sequel, as where it ends, she is kind of out of what would seem to be the main part of the prophecy.