The Base of Reflections
What happens when the future abandons the past?
Elise and her companions have made it to the safety of Uracil but at a price. Desperate to secure her family’s passage, she makes a deal with Uracil’s Tri-Council. She’ll become their spy, jeopardising her own freedom in the process, in exchange for her family’s safe transfer. But first she has to help rescue the next Neanderthal, Twenty-Two.
Twenty-Two has never left the confines of the steel walls that keep her separated from the other exhibits. She has no contact with the outside world and no way of knowing why she has been abandoned. With diminishing deliveries of food and water, she has to start breaking the museum’s rules if she wants a second chance at living.
One belongs to the future and the other to the past, but both have to adapt—or neither will survive…
Purchase Link – http://mybook.to/TBOR
Review
Elise and her friends return. In this book they set out to rescue another Neanderthal and bring Elise’s family back to Uracil on the way. Things don’t go to plan.
I enjoyed the development of the plot, and Elise and Samuel’s relationship development now that they are free of the Thymine base restrictions. Luca is drawing away from the group for his own reasons and I envisage him getting more difficult in the third book.
The sub-plot of the escape attempt from Cytosine is interesting. Twenty-Two, Twenty-Seven, Ezra and Dara are a group unto themselves and the conflict as the two groups merge is interesting. Twenty-two is an interesting character, who starts with a strict set of rules that she breaks and a new set of ethics that she develops based on her beliefs and the new knowledge she gains outside the Cytosine Museum of Evolution.
I wonder if the author is drawing on the debunked hypothesis that autism comes from our Neanderthal ancestors? From the way the Neanderthal characters are described, I recognise the characteristics ascribed to autistic people by non-autistic people. That said, Samuel comes across as autistic too. I say debunked because Neanderthal genes are found in greater percentages in European people than in others because Neaders didn’t go back to Africa or far into Asia, but there are no differences in rates of autism, although social conditions don’t allow for proper identification in all parts of the world. Also, autism is so complicated that it’s impossible to trace it to something so simple and there’s no evidence to support a lot of the claims about Neanderthals that are used to prop up the hypothesis.
Ignoring my segue into a current fascination, the book is an enjoyable read, with good plot and character development. The end was a bit unexpected, and I missed the build up. But that might just be me.
Author Bio –
AE Warren lives in the UK. A not-so-covert nerd with mildly obsessive tendencies, she has happily wiled away an inordinate amount of time reading and watching sci-fi/ fantasy and gaming. She is interested in the ‘what ifs’.
The Museum of Second Chances is her first novel and she is currently writing the third book in the ‘Tomorrow’s Ancestors’ series.
Social Media Links –
Instagram – @amauthoring
Facebook – @amauthoringTwitter – @amauthoring
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