Review: Paradigm

Paradigm by Ceri A. Lowe
Paradigm #1
Publisher: Bookouture
Release Date: June 13th, 2014
Date Read: 5/8/2014 to 5/16/2014
382 Pages
Rating: ✰✰✰1/2

What if the end of the world was just the beginning?

Alice Davenport awakens from a fever to find her mother gone and the city she lives in ravaged by storms – with few survivors.

When Alice is finally rescued, she is taken to a huge underground bunker owned by the mysterious Paradigm Industries. As the storms worsen, the hatches close.

87 years later, amidst the ruins of London, the survivors of the Storms have reinvented society. The Model maintains a perfect balance – with inhabitants routinely frozen until they are needed by the Industry.

Fifteen-year-old Carter Warren knows his time has come. Awoken from the catacombs as a contender for the role of Controller General, it is his destiny to succeed – where his parents failed.

But Carter soon discovers that the world has changed, in ways that make him begin to question everything that he believes in. As Carter is forced to fight for those he loves and even for his life, it seems that the key to the future lies in the secrets of the past...

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I received an e-ARC of this book from NetGalley. Thank you Bookouture!

So. How do I begin this. Ugh, I'm just going to start out with my little summary and go from there.

Paradigm is set in a world after a major catastrophic disaster, and our two main characters, Alice Davenport and Carter Warren, are separated by time. This weather disaster is caused by none other than our good friend global warming, by causing huge storms and rainfalls to flood the earth, killing everyone but a select few. Alice, home alone, has no idea what's going on with all the loud sounds and the rain, until she actually looks outside the window. From then on out, survival of the fittest has begun. Well, until she's rescued by Paradigm industries, who foresaw all of this and built a huge building for safekeeping survivors. Oh, and then there's also Mr. Hutchinson which we will get to later.

A number of years later (a lot of year, I'm not sure the exact number), there's Carter Warren, an inhabitant of the new Community and contender for the Controller General (basically the "leader" of this community). He's recently been unfrozen to contribute to society, and obviously to take his place as the new controller general, or at least try out for it.

So yes, basically like The Walking Dead, or the PS3 game The Last of Us! Except replace the zombies with mutated wolves and huge rats! Oh, and also they're much more prepared.

It's really the scenery that's very similar. Obviously.

I'm actually not sure where my judgment lies with this book. On one hand, I did enjoy it at some points, but then on the other, there were definitely some things that bothered me a little.

For me, I had a very rocky beginning. Not only was I introduced to Carter while he was being frozen for like 20 years, which confused me a ton, the writing felt a little off, kind of forced. I had no idea why Carter was being frozen, or why it was important/bad that he had children, or HOW he didn't know he had children, and then there were lines like these:

• "screwed his eyes together"  wait, wut? 
• "The luminous green second hand scratched around with the rhythm of the rain and Alice gulped down two more glasses of water."
• "...she looked around and ran back out of the shelter and into the blinding lights of the oncoming Transporter as it careered towards her. There was a piercing scream..."

In that last line, I literally thought this girl ran into the Transporter (a huge, well, vehicle type transporter) and then DIED because she got ran over. But no, the "scream" was describing the sound of the vehicle stopping. I had to read this line (plus more after the dots) to finally understand this.

With Lowe's writing, you could really tell at which parts she was struggling with. But then there were also other parts where her writing was really good (unless I got too used to the writing style and it's just me.) But in my opinion, it flowed pretty well during the important and climatic scenes. The book did pick up very nicely in the end.

For example, since I became more attached to Alice over Carter, there was one scene where her and a team of explorers finally go outside to clean up a living area that made me a little emotional. Along with this, the book brought up some very nice themes and questions, like whether we should completely start over from scratch, or build up from what we know after a tragedy or disaster such as this.

But then there were other scenes that just didn't sit well with me, like when Mr. Hutchinson barges into Alice's original home, pretends to be helping her, then gets drunk off her mother's alcohol, and then almost rapes her. Um, okay, I guess this leads to Alice's character development somehow. 

Overall, yes, I did enjoy Paradigm. It's not exactly the top read of 2014, but it is decent. I've read worse. There is a switch in POV between each chapter, which was a good or bad thing depending on what happened in the book. I kept on looking forward to Alice's POV, because I didn't care for Carter much. But besides that, I would recommend this to anyone wanting to read a dystopia "after the the end of humanity" that gives a description of how the dystopia actually started. I feel like most books don't usually start that way, which is what makes Paradigm unique in that aspect.

Also, I think I'm now more afraid of climate change and global warming and natural disasters in general, because I definitely do not want what happened in this book to happen to meeeeeee.