The Bane by Keary Taylor

Release date: 5 March 2013

Publisher: Keary Taylor

Number of pages: 352

My rating: 4/5

The Bane was awesome! It was an exciting and original read. I enjoyed reading it very much.

The Bane is a story about technology gone wrong. Scientists create a new treatment, which allows new cybernetic organs to replace damaged ones. This technology goes wrong when the cybernetic parts spread all over their body, replacing their humanity and turning them into monsters. The infection spread by touch – one touch is all it takes. Most of humanity is wiped out. Eden is a small group of about 30 people who are trying to survive. We follow Eden as they try to survive in this post-apocalyptic world.

The characters and relationships were probably the lowest part of the novel. Our main character, Eve was pretty kickass. She knew how to fend for herself. She reminded me of Katniss from The Hunger Games. Both girls are just trying to survive, but I felt that Katniss was far more developed than Eve. There’s the camp doctor, Avian. A new guy, West, who has many secrets, and a whole bunch of other characters. None of them were well developed, and I had trouble distinguishing West, Avian, and Gabriel. Even after finishing it, I still don’t know if Gabriel was the leader of Eve or if Avian was. Some of the characters had some backstory, but most didn’t. The characters could have been worked on a little more in terms of personality and backstories.

One thing that felt weird to me was that this book is actually part of a trilogy. It felt a lot more like a stand-alone to me. All but one end was closed. Only one plot point was left open, and we’ll have to wait for the next book to see how this plays out. This didn’t really feel enough to me to warrant another book in the series, but I’ll be picking up the next book anyway.

The Bane is pretty action packed. With awesome robot cybernetics, heaps of weapons and secrets, The Bane will keep you on your toes all the way through. The pacing was fantastic, and it was very well written.

The thing with self-published books is that around 90% of them are low quality. Some people don’t even bother to edit their books before they put them up for sale. However, if you weed through all the crap, you can find a really nice gem.

This book is one of them. It’s great quality, and better than heaps of the traditionally published books I’ve read. I can tell that Keary Taylor really put a lot of effort and care into her book, and the result is a fantastic, action packed book.

I will definitely be picking up the next book in this amazing series.

An ARC of this book was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.