Susan Waggoner
Young Adult/Dystopian/SciFi
224 pages
Henry Holt
Available now
Source: ARC from publisher for review
THE STORY (from Goodreads)
London, 2218 A.D. Seventeen-year-old Zee is an intern empath. She’s focused on her job, poised for a great career—until one day an attractive patient undoes her hard-earned calm. As an empath, she cannot afford such distractions, but neither can she stay away from David, even when she discovers he’s one of a mysterious alien race. As London comes under attack by anarchist bombings, and as Zee struggles to get a handle on her unusually strong psychic abilities, David starts pulling away. Although Zee’s sure he’s attracted to her, David has secrets he cannot share. But it’s too late for Zee. She’s losing her heart to the gray-eyed alien boy, and she’s determined to follow him—no matter how far it may take her.
MY THOUGHTS
At just over two hundred pages, Neptune's Tears is a short and exceedingly quick read, thrusting us a couple hundred years into the future as London fights a losing battle against anarchists and their shock wave bombs. While the story itself is easily devoured and moves at a nice pace, only granting us a few moments of quiet to catch our breath before the action or romance heat up again, it feels quite disjointed at times. Zee's empathic ability and the bombings run parallel to her romance with David and his alien status, the two never seeming to cross or link, but continue on side by side so it feels almost as though there are two separate and distinct stories with Zee at the forefront contained in between the covers of this single book.
Zee and David are both characters who might be described as “nice”, lacking characteristics and personalities that truly make them leap from the pages in blaze of memorable glory, instead they are easily lost in the shuffle of thousands of characters those of us who devour multiple books a week every week have bouncing around in our heads. They're both sweet, and there's no doubt we enjoy the time we have with them, but their love does happen quickly (not unsurprising giving the relatively short page length), and we simply don't get to revel in the promise of them and the desirable will they/won't they tension that tightens our guts with romantic anticipation.
Part of the reason our hearts don't quite find themselves pierced (as Zee and company refer to falling in love) the way Zee and David's do is due to the aforementioned separation of the two main aspects of Zee's life: her abilities as an empath and her relationship with David. For a few chapters our focus will be on one or the other, watching as Zee's gift grows as she aids those affected by the bombing before we suddenly switch gears to David, the questions surrounding his alien nature and his reasons for being on Earth, leaving Zee's empathic abilities all but forgotten until a few chapters later when we switch back once again. It's a little like reading while someone continuously moves an eye patch from one of our eyes to the other, each eye seeing something different while the other is covered, and we're denied the clarity that comes when both eyes are able to work together.
Overall, Neptune's Tears leaves us with a myriad of questions regarding the world itself and Zee's empathy, unsure as to whether empaths are unique and are alone in their abilities, or if there are others in this future exhibiting different types of gifts. We also have quite a few questions about David and his alien race, and though some of those questions are explained away toward the end, new questions simply arise from the answers. Neptune's Tears is a story that likely could have benefited from a few additional chapters, allowing those parallel storylines to slowly shift closer together until they eventually merged into a strong, cohesive tale that dazzled us like the diamonds from which it gets its title.
Rating: 3.5/5
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This
book was sent to me by the publisher free of charge for the purpose of a
review.
I received no other compensation and the above is my honest opinion.
