Revealing Eden by Victoria Foyt

Eden lives on a future earth, an earth in which Caucasians have become the minority and are hated for the fragility of their skin - and they have been given the derogatory name "Pearls."  As a second class citizen, Eden's only joy is in her boyfriend and in learning.  Her boyfriend, however, is not a pearl, so he has to be a secret - and Eden knows that unless she finds a mate by the time she's eighteen, she'll be cut off from all resources.  Will her boyfriend risk degrading himself and mate with a Pearl?  All of Eden's hopes are riding on it and to try and win him over she trusts him with a secret that will change everything.

Oh Eden.  She has such a hard time making sensible choices.  In a world where there is no one to trust, Eden just keeps trying, usually with disastrous consequences.  Her brilliant scientist father isn't really any help at all.  After about the first fifth of the book, the whole game changes and I could not BELIEVE where this story took me and not really in a good way.

What I did like? The idea of this racial society so different and opposed to our own, that was interesting.  I liked the science fiction-y world she created where white people had to play at being black and live underground in order to stay safe. 

What did I not like?  Spoilers here, I guess.   I didn't like Eden's love interest for most of the story.  He's part animal, first of all, so that's sort of too icky for me to really get into.  Bestiality is not so much my thing.  But he's also falsely deep, we have to be TOLD so much of what is good about him, we never get to see it.  And their relationship played out WAY too much like a romance novel for me.  Nothing ever really happened beyond kissing but the back and forth, hate you love you, stuff just made me feel frustrated and ready for the story to end, unfortunately.  Their love just felt too contrived for me. 

And to be honest, there isn't actually much of a plot.  We just kind of hang around and wait for the beast-lover to come back from wherever he's gone.  The father character is particularly flat, to the point where I actually had to stop and roll my eyes.

It got so many good reviews on amazon - other people seem to really enjoy it.  Probably I should have just put it down after the first hundred pages. 

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