Book Review: Genesis (Book 1 of The Rosie Black Chronicles) by Lara Morgan
Welcome to the city of Newperth, a futuristic version of present-day Perth in Australia. The oceans have risen, the gap between the haves (the Centrals) and the have-nots (the Bankers) has widened dramatically and the homeless (the Ferals) are pretty much as they are today, misunderstood and shunned. Rosie Black is a Banker but she goes to a Central school thanks to her aunt Essie’s charity and dreams of being a space pilot just like her aunt.
One day when she’s exploring the ruins of the Old City with her Central friend, Juli, Rosie finds a box with a mysterious logo on it and some mysterious contents in it, including a comkey. When they plug it into the comnet at Juli’s house, it tells them a beacon has been activated and a retrieval team is on the way. Rosie yanks it out of the comnet but it’s too late. The events of the novel have already been triggered.
Rosie knows her aunt can help but she’s in space and not due back until the next day so she has to just wait. She escapes the clutches of Ferals Riley and Pip, who know she has the box, and makes it home in time to escape the clutches of Helios, another set of baddies, but then witnesses her father being attacked and dragged away. And after she finds out Juli and her whole family have died in a mysterious explosion at their home where the comkey was plugged into the comnet. Suddenly, Rosie is the key player in a story that really has nothing to do with her.
That’s how it feels for the whole novel. If Rosie wasn’t there, the reader would have barely noticed her absence. She’s not particularly interesting and her skills aren’t really required. The same story could have played out with her presence at all. Essie, Riley and Pip are the far more interesting characters and yet they exist only on the sidelines.
In fact, the same story has played out without Rosie plenty of times before. The plot is derivative and felt like a lot of other stories I’ve read before mashed together in an effort to make it feel new. It’s a young adult, sci-fi, adventure, romance hybrid and doesn’t do justice to any of those genres.
The romance is clichéd and awfully reminiscent of an eighties Mills & Boon. The sci-fi is so-so. The adventure involves an awful lot of running away. The young adult components are the most successful but struck me as uninventive, unoriginal, sometimes inappropriate and a little bit ho-hum. Despite Rosie being in constant danger, it’s amazing how much time she devotes to thinking about Pip and how much she likes/hates/likes/hates/likes him depending on whether he’s helping or betraying her. And when he has to strip off his shirt to bandage her sprained ankle, it was just a little too contrived.
But, of course, I’m not the demographic of the intended audience. I don’t think it should matter – a good book is a good book regardless – but all of the issues I had with the book will probably be overlooked by a teenage audience who don’t overanalyse these things.
Genesis is the first book in a trilogy and I think it suffers from something that many planned trilogies do – the writer not spending enough time focused on writing just one great book. If a sequel and then a third book to make a trilogy are warranted, it should be decided by the insistence of the readers who loved the first book. But when writers decide from the start that they want to write a three-book series, a lot is held back for the second and third books, usually to the detriment of the first. That sense came through here.
Still, it’s readable. A couple more rewrites, the elimination of a character or two and giving those left some more complex motivations and it could have been great instead of okay. The cover art and design is brilliant, not something I usually comment on, but just too perfect not to mention, stark and beautiful at the same time.
In a few words: best left for teenagers.
3 stars
*First published on Goodreads 2 September 2017
