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Driven by Eve Kenin
 | Driven Eve Kenin Romance novel 2007 Rating: C+ |
Eve Kenin’s Driven has some unique and fascinating world building, a kick ass heroine, and a genetically enhanced (super) hero, but its plot and villain are too well traveled to make this much more than an average read.
Raina Bowen has lived her life alone. Her father brutalized her both physically and emotionally, training her through beatings and verbal bludgeoning never to trust anyone and always to be on guard and ready to make hard decisions. As hard as it was, however, it was useful training for the post-Apocalypse world Raina inhabits. She hauls freight on the Intercontinental Worldwide, a highway through the Northern Waste of what used to be Canada. Raina has a dream of a better life in a more moderate climate, one that might include family and friends. That dream can only be achieved if she wins the monetary prize for the Gladow Station race. The first trucker to reach the new settlement with a haul of genetically engineered grain will win fifty million interdollars. Raina is determined to win, but to enter the race she needs a temporary trucking license a man she only knows as “Wizard” can get for her. She is waiting at a truck stop for Wizard when she seems him being targeted for a beating by a group of truckers. Not pausing to think, Raina steps in and rescues Wizard. Only to make herself a new target for these brutal bullies and visible once again to the evil which has been searching for her for years.
The good part about this book is the first half in which Kenin introduces her vision of a post-nuclear holocaust world. The Earth is different, the technology is different - but people, for good or for bad, are much the same. Raina lives in a very harsh environment and has to survive in an ice world in which temperatures far below zero are the norm. Having just lived through a record-breaking harsh winter, I can relate to her feelings about the cold and found her methods of dealing with it quite interesting. Kenin invents some cool new technologies I can only wish were available now. As in most impoverished countries, power is in the hands of few and those few aren’t taking the moral high ground. Which leaves the most vulnerable citizens, the children, having to fend for themselves. Homelessness is endemic and orphans have become tough and aggressive. Again, having become personally aware of conditions for children worldwide, in orphanages and on the street, this seemed only a natural result of post-war social, political, and economic disorder. I generally feel manipulated when romance authors play the orphan card in their stories, here I bought it as flowing naturally from the overall chaotic situation. I felt for these orphans. I would have enjoyed the story more had it spent more page time with the orphans.
Unfortunately, the plot focused more on Raina’s conflict with the story’s eeevil villain. This conflict arises from Raina’s more believable troubles with the local trucking bullies and her dealings with the more malignant ice pirates. The truckers and the pirates - they seemed real. As long as Raina’s problems remained local, I was hooked, but once her arch nemesis joined the fray, the book began to skid and fishtail.
It didn’t help that, by then, it was more clear who and what Wizard was, so his mystery was revealed, leaving the reader with a fairly typical feisty-heroine-meets-emotionally-deadened-hero story. Wizard is emotionally sterile for more interesting than usual reasons, but how his inability to emote affects the relationship and Raina’s feelings makes for much more standard romance fare. Wizard was a unique hero, but (perhaps understandably) he didn’t have enough flesh to his character to achieve three-dimensional status.
The love scenes here are hot, but also standard. I skimmed them. I get tired of the love-and-need-revealed-through-great-sex claptrap in this genre.
Overall, Driven was about a C+ for me. I don’t regret reading it, but I’m glad I got it through my library. I would give Kenin another shot, though, just to see what else she can do with the fascinating world she has begun to build.
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