Revealing Eden: Save the Pearls Part One by Victoria Foyt

I don't know where to start with this one. To be blunt, I disliked it. A lot. For many reasons.

The whole premise of the book intrigued me at first, but I thought it was handled very poorly by the author. She reinforced negative racial stereotypes with her characters that are black; almost all of the "Coal" characters are bad guys or have very bad traits while the lighter-skinned characters are most often the nice people. The "Coal" male love interest in the book literally gets turned in a cat-man, and he is promptly referred to by Eden, the main white female protagonist, as the "beast" or in terms that highlight his animal features. Oh, but she's attracted to him more when he's partly animal, far more than when she was slightly attracted to him when he was fully human. It just...It didn't sit well with me.

Foyt also uses blackface for her white characters; although she apparently claims it was for protection for the white characters, there's also definitely an appearance quality to it. On top of all of this, there's the FFP, which is like this world's version of the KKK since the Coals want to get rid of the Pearls. It just seemed wrong to mirror history in that way, as if Foyt didn't grasp the seriousness of the situation and just thought it would be a good twist in her story. Treated correctly, I could see this theme being truly thought-provoking and deep, but I don't think Foyt handled her subject matter very well. Some of the book just seemed so inappropriate that I wanted to put the it down, but I ended up continuing to read because I couldn't imagine where she was going with the story. I found out...but I sort of wish I hadn't. The storyline felt chaotic, rushed and frenetic.

Eden is possibly the most frustrating, insipid, impulsive, selfish, erratic, wishy-washy characters I have ever come across. She hates Bramford! She loves Bramford! She hatesloveshatesloveshatesloves Bramford. She flip-flops so many times that I expected that she was legitimately crazy by the end of the book. I like a complex main character and I sometimes even like to read about protagonists that I'm not particularly fond of, but I'm not a big fan of a main character that do dumb, selfish things with barely any logic behind their actions. And Eden is FULL of stupid, self-centered actions. She flings them out willy-nilly and scatters them around the place for other people to "enjoy" the consequences. Out of all the characters, even the ones that were the villains, I disliked her the most. And she's the main character.

On a better note, the writing was tolerable and some of Foyt's metaphors and setting descriptions are nice. I also liked the twist with Bramford's family, though I'm still a little fuzzy on the details. Maybe more will be explained in the second book, though I highly doubt I will be reading that one. I didn't really enjoy this book, so I'm pretty sure I won't like the next one either.

I would like to thank NetGalley.com and Sand Dollar Press Inc for allowing me to read the galley for this book.