The author, in her acknowledgements, describing when she picked up this as a half-finished product after leaving it alone for two years: "It was only halfway written. I had no idea how to end it."
*looks at ending*
Me: "Yeah, that tracks"
And that, I think, is the core of the problem with this book. It has a strong vision going for the first half, but then the main character completes her first journey, and... then what?
The author answered that question with a course of action that felt more like it should have been a second book.
Basically, the story takes place in an alternate future Texas where humans tried to fix global warming (or something) but accidentally broke the world instead, causing all sorts of weird mutated things and crazy weather to take over the land. They then built a bunch of cities inside giant domes, kicked out anyone they didn't like, let the farmers do their own thing because they still needed food, and started doing drugs.
Actually, I'm pretty sure the drugs are a recent development, but yeah. The main antagonist of this book is an evil company that makes drugs, and its minions and drug dealers are the secondary antagonists.
There's also rebels trying to blow up the domes and failing because the domes have their own army, and a bunch of Mad Max wannabes who do nothing but hunt the more giant of the weird mutated things.
Into all this steps our main character, Juniper, a teenage girl with a mysterious triangle necklace and a pair of dead parents. She doesn't want to be in any of the domes, but particularly in one specific dome because her parents died there, so she joins a bunch of monster truckers (who haul food between the domes and the farms-where-people-do-their-own-thing) to escape. Along the way she fights evil drug dealers, her mysterious necklace does mysterious things, there's this guy named Dax who's extremely abrasive and constantly wears sunglasses, and a couple of the monster truckers die.
Then she reaches the farm, and I think that's where the author left off the first time, because it sort of flails around for a while and then starts up something entirely different. Juniper wanders around the farm for a while, then after acquiring a two-headed bird of bad-omen-ness, heads back to a city and... infiltrates the rebels who keep failing to blow up the domes? And then returns to the farm? And then some more evil drug dealers show up, Dax-with-the-sunglasses removes his sunglasses and reveals that he's actually a cyborg supersoldier or something who can stop time, Juniper does more mysterious things with her mysterious necklace to take down the evil drug dealers (just this band of them though), Juniper blacks out for four days, she finally wakes up, and... the book ends.
Did they defeat the evil company that makes the drugs? Nope. Did they do anything to get closure for Juniper's parents' death? Nope. Did we ever find out what happened to Dax? Nope. Did they even make a start at defeating the evil drugs company? Not really.
I would have accepted that last one as an ending, because "actually completely defeat the evil drugs company" would be very hard to do in the last three-eighths of a 250-ish-page novel; the saga of Juniper versus Orange Pipe (or whatever the company is called) could easily have taken a five-book-series to fully flesh out. An ending of "let's get the band together and start pushing back against the drugs" would have tied up the story's themes pretty nicely. Unfortunately, instead we have "We're going back to the dome city and, uh, maybe we can do something there?"
(So she did sort of do what I was expecting, but only sort of.)
The second half almost felt like she was just throwing things in to advance the plot along, similar to how I plotted my first novel. (That book as it now stands will never see the light of day.)
In conclusion, the author's assertion that she didn't know how to end the story was actually pretty spot on.
Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A strong T for sci-fi violence and some veiled sexual references.
3 stars. If the plot had followed its original direction, it probably would have gotten 4, but as I explained above...
(Endnote: The hardcover editions of all the Enclave Publishing books I've seen have some sort of design embossed in shiny metallic stuff on the cover. I think The Burning Tree had a leaf, and Winter's Maiden had a cool rune circle thing.)
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