L. L. Keyes

The premise of 'Worlds Apart' is intriguing, to say the least. A future earth torn apart by war due to an accident in medical technology, causing a split in human biology. Humans go to sleep for a hundred years to find themselves back to square one when it comes to their history with the "immortals".

Some of the critics of this book are being a tad to critical. The book presents an interesting plot that falls short on depth. This is a common theme for many items in the novel. In an effort to make flesh out the character the author unfortunately makes them overly emotional at times; however, I personally did not find this to distracting.

All in all, the book is a good read for fans of sci-fi. I have a feeling the author will be writing again in this world. My hope is that she will take the feedback and make it a great one!

I received a free copy of this book I'm exchange for a fair and honest review.… (altro)

This story is a good choice for those that enjoyed "The 100" series.

Due to genetic engineering, a group of people have "accidentally" become immortal. As the immortals became more common, the mortals grew to fear them as the two groups began fighting, leading to the mortals leaving Earth for the Moon and Mars.

Fast forward 100 years, and the immortals (and the Earth) seem to be thriving on their own. That is, until mortal Riva shows up at immortal Trace Martin's door. Turns out, not all mortals left. Instead, a large number of them were underground in stasis as they had planned to release a biological weapon that would wipe out the immortals.

A solar flare wrecked their plans just after they entered stasis, but now it's up to Riva to figure out what's happened in the last century before her commander returns the surviving mortals to stasis and reinitiates the bioweapon.

To be honest, the story was a bit slow to get through at first as there's a lot of sci-fi jargon and details thrown at you immediately. It feels a little like the writing expects you to already be at least moderately familiar with the world before the story starts. This writing style did make some of the story hard to visualize fully throughout the book but I was able to settle in reasonably once the plot starts picking up.

I read an arc copy so this *might* be addressed already in final publishing but there were also a few moments where there were some continuity discrepancies that pulled me out of the story briefly. Namely, when Riva tells Trace and Jana that she's not sure that Moon Command is even there to receive her call for help, despite her having had a full on conversation with her just hours prior.

Overall, there's definitely some writing issues that could do with some further editing for ease of reading, but a very interesting story!… (altro)

This book delivered its storyline in a bell-curve pattern. The first 10% consisted of character building and human divisiveness leaks; the next 70% got my adrenaline elevated as I followed the main character as she raced to stop Armageddon; and the last 20% was the main character's anxiety about how to govern the two conflicting sides of humanity, both mortal and immortal. After the book’s middle 70%, its building climax, I felt let down by the mundanity of governance issues. The book could have ended better absent the author’s philosophical narration about that topic.

A law professor I once had said, ‘If you have a weak argument, use a big word. Most of the jury won’t know what it means and will be too self-conscious to admit it. Also, it leaves them with the impression that you’re smart so you must know what you're talking about during your argument.’ The last part of the book gave me the impression that the author wrote it while making frequent references to a thesaurus to find her big words.

Despite these thoughts, I think Lauren Keyes, the author, is on the road to writing success. Worlds Apart is well worth the read. And being the first book in her series, it can stand on its own as a complete read while hinting at future mortal-immortal storylines. Riva Dorn, her main character, intends to remedy the two human variants’ divisiveness through persuasive leadership. I’m looking forward to reading the next book to see how that goes.… (altro)