Book: Evolution by Kelly Carrero

Self-Published by Kelly Carrero in October 2012|138 pages

Where I Got It: I own the e-book

Series: Evolution #1

Genre: YA Sci-Fi/Paranormal

Seventeen year old Jade Sommers’ life is turned upside down the moment she sees the inch long cut across her face heal right before her eyes.

Jade thinks she is going insane, but her boyfriend, Aiden Scott, knows better. He knows what she is. And like him, she was born this way.

Now if finding out that people like her shouldn’t exist isn’t bad enough, Jade’s best friend is kidnapped by the psycho who terrorises her dreams. With the help of Aiden, Jade has to figure out how to save her before it’s to late.

But what Jade doesn’t know is not everything is what it seems. She is merely a puppet in a sadistic game to find out what she is truly capable of, and that game has only just begun.

I’ve had Evolution for a while, and finally started reading it, but I also wasn’t a big fan of the book.  It had the potential to be really interesting, but it also fell short.

The book is sort of based on that idea that we only use a certain percentage of our brains, only in this book, there are people who have evolved to the point that they have special abilities because they can use a larger percentage of their brain.  Sort of like that movie that came out a couple of years ago with Morgan Freeman and Scarlett Johansson, Lucy?  That’s what I was reminded of, but without the whole drug-trafficking story line.

So, there were things about this book that didn’t make sense to me.  She was told she had all of these abilities, but her boyfriend, the only person she knows who has the same abilities as her, doesn’t really explain what’s going on, and why some people can do what they can, and others can’t.  The part in the summary where it mentions someone terrorizing her dreams, and that she’s a puppet in this huge game?  That didn’t really happen in the book. At all.  I finished this book (which was a lot shorter than I thought it would be) with more questions than I did when I started.  Did her boyfriend know the entire time that Jade has supernatural abilities?  Because the summary made it seem like he knew, and hung around in Australia for that reason.

I was also left wondering why someone kidnapped her best friend, why a select few have this ability, and what sort of “game” is going on?  Considering everything the summary says this book is about, I really expected a lot more to be going on.  I want more of an explanation than the idea that some people are born really advanced.  This first book makes it seem like it’s this very select group of people…and yet it also seems like it’ might be somewhat common.

And Jade’s mom is super-absent, but has no problem with her teenage daughter constantly staying at her boyfriend’s house.  That seemed a little weird to me, and it makes me wonder what was going on with her mom, because her mom constantly blew her off.  And it seemed like the mom was hiding something.

There’s just no backstory, and while the idea was interesting, I just didn’t like how it was told.  It was too rushed, too short, and really hard to believe. And I know I have said that there are no explanations for anything, but it was really frustrating.  Things happened for no reason, and the book didn’t make a lot of sense because of that.

The characters were a little too…boring.  Aiden was too perfect, and Jade was not memorable.  Actually, Aiden wasn’t very memorable either, and I could not tell you a single thing about them.  I really couldn’t.

1 star.  The idea was sort of interesting, but the lack of explanation about pretty much anything makes me not want to keep reading the series.