Saturday, October 2, 2010

Fourty-three: Adam & Eve - Sena Jeter Naslund

**Full Disclosure: I received this book free of charge at a publisher's book event at ALA Annual Conference**

Lucy watches as her husband Thom is crushed and killed by a suspended piano.  That morning Thom had told her he had discovered extraterrestrial life and gave her his thumb drive with all his research.  Unsure what to do now that Thom is dead, Lucy attends a symposium in his name a few years later.  There she meets Pierre Saad an anthropologist genuinely interested in her well-being more than Thom's research.

A few weeks later while traveling around Egypt, Lucy runs into Pierre and his daughter Arielle.  They ask her to smuggle a new codex for the book of Genesis out of the country.  Lucy agrees and flies out of Egypt on a small plane.  A few hours into the flight she loses control of the place and crashes.  She's not sure where she is but is helped to safety, after being badly burned during the crash, by a naked man named Adam.

It turns out they are in a modern day "Eden" between multiple war zones in the Middle East.  Lucy nurses herself back to health and learns to accept her nudeness as well.  Adam doesn't know how long he's been there and he shares how he was raped and left on the side of the road in Iraq. Lucy & Adam learn to trust each other and provide for themselves. They help a pilot who crashes in Eden and search for the codex that Lucy threw out of the place before she crashed.

Certain events finally cause them to leave Eden and return the codex to Pierre.  At the airport they run into "the bad guys" Perpetuity and somehow escape them.  Before escaping Lucy finally gets to see again what is on the memory stick that Thom left her that day.  She finds out that he loved other "Lucys" and not just her.

Adam and Lucy eventually make it back to Pierre & Arielle safely.  The four dive into translating and figuring out the codex.  They explore the underground caves under Pierre's house. The bad guys eventually show up and try to take the codex from them but they escape but not without injury.

This book was not what I expected after reading the brief synopsis. I thought there would be more science versus religion questioning.  But I felt the major theme was more philosophy driven.  At times I was confused how the next chapter related to the next.  The whole book was set in 2020-2021.  I think the premise of the book is interesting but the action of the plot kinda stopped three-quarters of the way through the book.  Also parts of the plot were very sparsely described.  The author tries to generate a DaVinci Code drama with the Perpetuity group but those chapters were hard to read and link to the other chapters. 

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