Double-Helix: Tempest

Rating:

About the Author:
(Taken from Amazon)

R. Patricia Wayne was born in Chicago, Ill and raised in the Midwest, now calling the great state of Iowa her home. Her bookshelves are full of books in every genre, but her passion is in science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories. Her personal interests include writing, coffee, reading, coffee, sleeping, and coffee.


Blurb:

The adventure begins in the year 2256.

Mars has been terraformed into a tropical paradise where there is peace, beauty, and the colonists have finally completed their first interstellar spaceship. Although life is good, a genetic bottleneck and genetic mutations have plagued the Mars colonists for more than two hundred years, leaving the population with 95% female inhabitants and men who are born sterile.

Chancellor Janna sends her only daughter Aura, a fifteen-year-old schizophrenic and next in line to be Chancellor, to planet Earth in hopes of finding human survivors to cure their genetic crisis. Little does the Chancellor know, there are others that likes things the way they are.

While Aura is forced to fight to survive on a frozen, post-apocalyptic Earth, others are fighting to keep Mars from slipping into tyranny. And in the process, a temporal vortex is birthed. This vortex, the Tempest, will forever change the past, present, and future, and put the fate of the entire galaxy in jeopardy. The fall of humanity is at hand.

The sometimes strange, sometimes humorous, sometimes dark and disturbing world of Double Helix is a character-rich, science fiction, epic adventure.

Review:

Disclaimer
I have received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.


This is an epic novel, spanning two planets and unfurling an intricate political drama. 

The novel follows several characters, all female, and focuses mainly on each of their lives and struggles.  This is probably the highlight of the story, itself.  Each character has a flaw and layers, which helps bring them each to life.  From a "princess" with a technology phobia (imagine having to deal with that in the future), to a soldier who wants to fit in, to my favorite, a badass police officer (referred to as Protectorates) with criminal desires  — all of them struggle to overcome negative traits that prevent them from living their lives to the fullest.

Of course, being an honest review, I also have to point out a things that brought this down a star for me.  The novel felt too long to me, and there were a few times the details were unnecessarily drawn out.

Following are some descriptions that stood out the most to me:


"There wasn't much visible through the wall of falling water except streetlights struggling to illuminate the flooded avenues and a single red and blue neon sign above the nightclub that read, The Citadel, which beamed through the rainy darkness like a lighthouse."


"... the decaying ruins of thousands of frozen buildings which lined ancient city streets, and only broken up by mounds of debris on both sides of one massive trench of black smoldering topsoil."



Overall, I see this novel being the foundation of what should be a fascinating universe once the author is finished with all of the books.  As a teaser, as the novel continues on, the universe opens up to multiple dimensions, time travel, and a hidden secret society, and so much more.

This absolutely is on my Must-Reads List.

Purchase your copy at Amazon!