Archetype by M.D.
Waters
From Amazon:
In a future where
women are a rare commodity, Emma fights for freedom but is held captive by the
love of two men—one her husband, the other her worst enemy. If only she could
remember which is which . . .
In the stunning first volume of a two-book series that will appeal to readers of William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, Emma wakes with her memory wiped clean. Her husband, Declan—a powerful and seductive man—narrates the story of her past, but Emma’s dreams contradict him. They show her war, a camp where girls are trained to be wives, and love for another man. Something inside warns her not to speak of these things, but the line between her dreams and reality is about to shatter forever.
In the stunning first volume of a two-book series that will appeal to readers of William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, Emma wakes with her memory wiped clean. Her husband, Declan—a powerful and seductive man—narrates the story of her past, but Emma’s dreams contradict him. They show her war, a camp where girls are trained to be wives, and love for another man. Something inside warns her not to speak of these things, but the line between her dreams and reality is about to shatter forever.
My First Impression:
The story is told from the first person perspective in
present tense. Emma wakes up and thinks
and sees people and doesn't remember anything.
A few pages later, time has passed and she is in the company of a man
named Declan who is telling her she is his wife, but she doesn't understand the
meaning of the word. They seem to spend
every day sitting for some time in a lounge and that is all there is to Emma’s
world besides her bedroom, but at night she has nightmares and dreams of a
different world and a different man.
She doesn't talk about the nightmares, not of the details, to
anyone. She is monitored 24 / 7 with a
video camera, so while she can’t prevent the doctors from knowing she is having
the nightmares, she pretends to not remember.
Her dreams range from looking up at the stars at night to being in a
test tube watched by a haunted man. It’s
a gut feeling to keep it secret.
First Sentence: My mind wakes, but the words essential to
describe the stirring of my consciousness escape me.
Most poetic paragraph: Dust particles float in the air, a
fluid, graceful contrast to the vibrating hum of the light above me. The motes dance around my slim, pale fingers,
escaping my grasp, frustratingly transitory, like everything else I experience.
And that sums it up for me, frustrating. Time is passing by rather rapidly, but
nothing ever seems to happen. Emma is in
a hospital for some reason we don’t know because she doesn't know. We are only aware of what she is aware
of. Things only seem to happen in her
dreams, which was the only interesting part to me. The moments when she was awake were
tiresome. I didn't care who Declan was
or anything about him. I just wanted to
find out what happened to her.
In this instance, I didn't think the first person present
tense worked very well and I found myself wishing the author had written in
past tense so that the narrator would have already been through this and we
could have been given some insight as to what the heck was going on. I was definitely curious about the back story,
but was it enough to make me want to buy the book?
Decision?
Not to buy
