Project ELE

I love stories like this, where some good young person inadvertently becomes empowered with special abilities but their good character keeps them from abusing them. The main character, Willow, finds herself in a facility that is meant to provide its citizens with the ability to survive an Extinction Level Event. She makes friends with someone and explores the facility. Conflict comes with a young bully whose dad owns the place.

The book has clean language. There’s too much making out for me to be able to recommend it to my kids, and I found it a little uncomfortable to read myself.

Seriously. Edit. The story is really pretty good. But come on. I at times am left wondering if there was even a designated proofreader on this project.

This feels like reading a rough draft of a potentially good book. I didn’t realize when I downloaded this that it was a self-published book. Good for the authors for getting their work out there, but this book needed an editor, or at least a proofreader, before going to print. I found the number of grammar mistakes and typos very distracting. I was shocked a book with so many glaring errors would have made it to distribution so I searched more reviews. That’s when I discovered this was self-published.

The story itself is an intriguing concept. I got sucked in quickly and poured through the first half of the book (except for the grammar speed bumps).

SPOILER ALERT.

By about half way through, I became annoyed with the vapid teen characterization. Willow is portrayed in the beginning as a devoted sister and daughter, but it was three months into the book’s timeline before her concern for the fate of her mother and brother is even mentioned, and then only as a fleeting thought. They are never mentioned again. I am a parent to a 15 year old girl, and even in her most egocentric teen moments, she doesn’t behave this self-absorbed. Willow loses half her family in one traumatic afternoon, after a lengthy and no-doubt impactful pandemic, and within days seems to have moved on to dating her new super hot, older boyfriend without any layers of other emotions. The book misses the opportunity to explore the depth of her grief and anxiety, her perseverance through those, such that the discovery of her own strength (and oh yeah, super powers … what?!) is more comical than triumphant. And what about her father? Another complex character and relationship we’d love to explore, but he’s given about 4 paragraphs in the entire first 2/3 of the book. He’s assigned a grueling and humiliating work detail after losing his wife and son, having no idea if they have survived on the outside, and we hear nothing about his struggle. Where is his anguish?

I was determined to finish the book because I want to know where the story lands, but as other reviews stated, I was only headed for a cliffhanger. There was no ending whatsoever. That’s unfortunate. Based on the current rough-draft state of this book, I won’t invest my time or money in reading 4 more unedited/unproofread books.