In the world of Eden a great evil has befallen mankind. Monsters of an unknown origin roam the lands, searching for those to use in populating their various races with. However, all the monsters in Eden are female, unable to give birth to any males for their kind. Now the men of humanity have become the target for these lustful creatures, and the women have taken up the blade in order to defend their race. It’s a dark time in the world and mankind is at war not only with itself but also the monsters that threaten to steal away all of their men. Yet there is one that believes not all of these creatures are truly evil, that some of them may actually be mankind’s key to survival in this world. And he’s willing to place his life, and virginty, on the line to prove it.
-This book is intended for mature audiences- -For those who have previous editions of the Chronicles of Eden series, please make sure you are on the correct book as the Acts have been edited-
My name is Alexander Gordon, an author who loves to write for the joy of it. I started my wonderful and, as expected, tiring journey through the world of writing by doing fanfiction first about an anime that I wanted to explore more in the world of. Yes, you could only imagine the amount of accolades I received doing that to begin with, and after continuing that for years with a smile on my face and a growing sense of joy for the craft I jumped over into publishing my own novels. And I've been doing this nearly everyday since then, something that has become a real passion of mine that can't be beat by anything. To this day I am still writing and plan on doing so for a very long time, I have many stories I wish to tell after all.
I like and dislike this book so far. The Main Character is ungodly flat and quite honestly really hard to like. He is about a dense and 4 miles of concrete. Seemingly obvious things elude him, but at the same time he has iron clad ideals that he stick too. He has awesome intentions, but doesn't think anything through at all. Then again, they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the MC is def on his way there. Now, the redeeming part of this book. The side characters, that's where all the life in this story resides. They are truly worth a book in themselves. Without them, this book would be a hard pass. To sum it up, have you ever watched/read an anime/manga that was based on a harem? This is it. The girl who is his best friend is a Tsundere, the witch is all about trying to jump his bones and makes no qualms about it. The 3rd girl is oblivious and innocent as hell. But the interaction between those 3 are what makes the book worthwhile. To see them plotting against each other and how they go about it is hilarious. To compare this to a TV show, it reminds me a lot of Grimm. If they just got rid of the MC, the story would be a LOT better.
Wow what an excruciating read. The main character, Daniel, is nothing. Literally nothing. He is the embodiment of mayonnaise, so bland you are barely able to tell he exists.
It's physically painful to read this story. There's a lot of room for real drama and action here but the entire book is just annoying bickering and irrelevant nonsense.
Great concept, horrid execution. DNF 35%.
At this point the only thing that could redeem this book is if Daniel turned out to be gay so I could see the ladies kill themselves in despair.
So, all the catfights and random hatred actually developed into a plot. Ignore the “i read 35% and couldn’t stand it” crowd. This this actually develops and delivers. I have two issues but they could frankly be part of the viability of this story. 1) daniel does not have a libido. 2) daniel has less knowledge of economics, math, commerce, or diplomacy than any MC has a right to...
Then i remember he is 19, others are actually written quite smartly and intelligently, and i think the author is just being honest. He’s a guy with a dream and no real plan. And ... somehow thats ok and this book works.
Warning, you have to be able to stand normal girl drama except powered by magic, strength, and charm. Meaning... its like mean girls on coffee. But i enjoyed it. And it gets better. Its not a stagnant plot.
Not a waste of time. Read the whole thing before judging. You’ll be surprised.
Here we have a story..A story about a Moron. One who somehow in his 18 years of life never looked around and saw what was going on around him between men and woman. This moron is so obtuse he can't see that his best friend is interested in him.............Would expect this from maybe a 11-12 year old. Not a 18 year old. Even in the world he was raised.
2 stars for the "Stupid boy/clueless" mechanic that is way overused.. Would have been 3-4 maybe more but there is only so much stupidity i will read.
/Did not finish
Only recommend this to those who can put up with lots of children bickering all the time.
Act 1 is a really fun book with a great cast of characters. This story definitely has a manga feel to it with the quirky main character Daniel Sorres and of course then the prerequisite girls who fawn over him. Monsters are women who want to procreate with the men of the world and its up to the human ladies to protect them.
Alexander has a wonderful imagination. I was pulled through his story with fascination as he made Daniel a very lucky man. Alexander might have a bright future as a writer if he would do a better job proofreading and editing. And, limiting words like JUMP to a few hundred per sentence.
The overall theme is not bad, however the world building is not well developed and on some level leaves me questioning the whole premise. This is because the interaction between the races and humans seem too artificial. Just from the scraps of info the author gave us on this world the social interaction would lead to many more logical states. For instance the ant colony. Humans with a bit of knowledge and manpower could steal away workers to create new colonies to be used as slave labor in mining or civil enginering like canals. Criminals or guys who like the monster girls can be used as breeders or even throw the worker girls in a whore house untill shes breed. Then to keep them under guard throw some antlions at strategic places.
Other parallels can be drawn with other races as well. Hell just have the monster girls set up a town of there own that is just mostly whore houses that men can use for free. Breeding and conflict mostly solved except for the evil bitches or one to ugly or monstrous.
That word is also one that bugged me. Why would other races identify themselves as monsters. The answer is they would not and would get pissed for being called one. Even Hitler didn't think of himself as monstrous.
So beside the plot holes a mile wide the author used to set up his fantasy harem the interaction of the characters was worse than being stuck in a bus full of arguing 13 year old girls. I mean the witch is 72 and the friend is 18 i think some maturity would sneak in somewhere even by accident. There is more but it's not worth my time to document it because if you can get pass all of the stuff so far mentioned then it not going to matter to you one way or the other.
Read via kindle unlimited Anime/manga styled story. Very evident harem theming. Author spends a great deal on upfront character development so you are a bit invested when the story real!y starts to unfold.
Thought a little to much time was spent in the squabblings s between the characters. That seemed to drag on a little longer than necessary.
Fantasy monster harem story. I almost abandon the story. There were a lot of infighting with the female characters (up thru 44%), there was a fight/battle and the infighting started up again thru near the end of the book. There were more than a few times were information was repeated and even word for word. I was hoping to enjoy the story, but due to bickering of the female characters I will not be continuing with the other books.
Even though the idea behind the story is interesting, the repetitive interaction between many of the characters makes it far less entertaining for me. I felt like I was slogging through the last third of the book, as I kept thinking it has so much promise, it will get better.
This book really had potential, it read the way an anime or manga would and really did a great job with flow and story structure. Unfortunately the issues that arose were due to the painful naivety of the characters! I will continue the series because the premise really is intriguing, I am just hoping for more depth to the characters in the next book.
Felt like I read "No I will be his mate" or similar sentence over 60 times. It was like reading a lazy child's homework, where they need to have over 300 words so the keep saying the same thing over and over again.
This book was a pretty good and enjoyable book although some words are used too much and it can ruin the reading experience. Other than that I enjoyed this book and will be reading part 2 of this book.
Interesting premise, poor emotional development of characters makes it more of a bad middle school puberty-riddled drama filled snooze fest. Very little likability and shallow “quest” vision leads to lots of drama filled dialogue with no depth.
Virtually the entire book was the same argument back and forth over the boy with uninteresting dialogue, essentially rehashing the same scene over and over.
33% of the book is a clueless dolt with a witch and human fighting over him. Pages and pages of repetative arguments. So boring. Could not keep reading.
I lost interest in the book half way through, to me the book was not painting a picture in my head and phrases being related constantly really bothered me.
I really wanted to like this book because it is heavily inspired in harem anime. This is something a lot of potential readers should be well aware of because one recurring complaint about the book from people immersed in anime/manga of this genre is that the male object of everyone's interest is expected to be aloof and therefore this book delivers perfectly well.
A world that is inhabited by lots of female monsters that have to "steal" human males in order to birth daughters? This is indeed very cool. I don't think I have encountered a manga with this kind of world and if done really well, it could have offered us a very dynamic and complex society where human women are trained to become amazoness warriors to protect their male inhabitants from capture. I could even imagine some cities where female infanticide is performed up to a certain degree to compensate the amount of males lost in raids. Polygamy would also be a common ocurrence in other towns so that several women could share their husband. It would also not be too far-fetched that a few cities are ruled by benevolent monsters with the capacity to control their innate sexual urges and live among humans in peace. It seems like certain monsters such as Elves have a greater tendency to coexist with humans thanks to their healing abilities and docile nature.
I don't hate the male main character in this book. Daniel is just horribly undeveloped with the lazy "orphaned at a young age" trope (because no half-decent parent would allow their precious son to wander around the world befriending horny monsters on purpose). I think the story would have been a lot more fun if he still had his mother who would have tried to stop him from leaving his town and hired the daughter of the city's current ruler to rescue him. It would have been a much stronger beginning than the rather weak speech Daniel says to the ruler saying it is his dream to befriend monsters even though he has zero fighting skills.
It doesn't take very long before Daniel and his bodyguard of sorts Triska (city ruler's daughter and his childhood friend) meet a Witch monster named Alyssa being gang raped by several human men. The gruesome scene luckily isn't graphic (still disturbing because she has the body of a 12 year old girl despite being more than 70 years old), and much to everyone's surprise, Alyssa had the audacity to con the men to perform their lewd act ON PURPOSE. Huh? The story doesn't hint much about Witch monster physiology, except that she has reached sexual maturity and is willing to get pregnant at all costs. So in case anyone is wondering whether this book is kid friendly, I would say no despite being written like a Middle Grade novel.
I liked Alyssa. She doesn't hide the fact she is infatuated with Daniel and does pranks, but she has self-control and is only willing to sleep with him when he is ready (considering the genre, that will not happen in ages because these kinds of guys take forever to choose someone).
The main problem of the story is Triska. She is boring, has no reason to be so possessive and yet she treats Daniel with complete disdain. Her only trump card is that she is the childhood friend trope and usually in these kinds of stories that equals to staying in the friendzone. If the worldbuilding had been handeled better, she could have expressed a far more urgent need to drag Daniel back home before he became the romantic target of more monsters. Instead since Daniel and Triska were allowed to leave the town with the ruler's blessing to fulfill his childhood dream, Triska begrudgingly is dragged along and as expected, she doesn't get along with Alyssa.
It seems like I read the revised book that has cut up the "chaff" where Triska fights Alyssa a gazillion times with her sword and loses the fight once the Witch uses her magic. And yet even with cutting so much filler, the bickering scenes go on endlessly and Triska never really entices the reader to like her or believe she is a better romantic option for Daniel than Alyssa who seems so far to be rather honest with him.
As a road trip book, a huge chunk of the fun of these stories is to let the sheltered Daniel visit other human enclaves and see how each city protects their males in differing ways. Maybe even include some cities where locals regard him as a hero because they also share his favorable worldview of benevolent monsters, whereas other cities might try to kill Alyssa and even Triska in order to capture Daniel and keep him for their own due to depopulation.
If the author had closed his eyes and really took a long time to think about how the dynamics of this world worked and how Daniel's views were sacrilegious for understandable reasons, I would have even tolerated Triska if villagers had treated her just as poorly as Alyssa for failing to protect Daniel. It would have been fun to see them teaming up together to save their gentleman-in-distress. The book had infinite potential to create a dynamic world that was wasted. After feeling like the book was meandering way too much without any action looming ahead for the rest of the book, I have given up.
Do you like Monster Girls? Do you like Romance? Do you like an Action-Fantasy romp with lots of magic? Do you like Harem Anime but wish the hero would man up? And do you like your Fantasy rated R for violence and sexual content? If you answered "Yes!" to all those questions, then welcome to the Chronicles of Eden! You owe it to yourself to buy this book. I haven't found anything else like this out there (if you have, please let me know) and thoroughly enjoyed each book in the series. I'd like to break down some of what I like so much about them because I think the first book is criminally underrated, especially in the larger context of the series. I don't want people who would love the series to be turned away because they aren't sure if it's worth their time or if it will fully commit to its premise. I'll go into more detail below but, if you don't want any spoilers at all, then simply know the first book and each one after have my full recommendation as a good time.
Other people have commented about the spelling and editing errors, and I won't deny the first book especially could use some tightening of the screws, but please consider the following. Between 12/10/13 and 12/10/16, Mr. Gordon has published nine 400+ page novels, and he's hoping to write two more in 2017. The man is a writing machine, and he clearly has more interest in pursuing his story than making each entry a technically and mechanically perfect piece of writing. I have fallen in love with the characters, story, and world of Eden and, to be honest, I don't care when I spot a spelling or grammatical error anymore. I just want him to release the next book as soon as possible. If he is one day able to go back and 'fix' all the problems with the early books, then that would be cool, but his time might be better spent on his next project.
I'm about halfway through, and I'll admit from a place of guilty pleasure that I like it so far. However, the writing is a bit redundant (you could get alcohol poisoning if you made a drinking game out of every time the writer uses "friend" to describe the relationship between Daniel and Triska), and is in desperate need of polishing. Also, the story walks an uncomfortable line with sexual violence that basically defines the entire plot, but I'm still interested enough to keep reading. Whether I'll like it enough to read the next one is a question yet to be decided. Some people have described this book as teen friendly. I would say this is definitely for mature audiences only with "mature" very liberally interpreted.
This story line has potential. If you ever wondered what a female dominated society, with very high competition for men, would be like. This will tell you. Definitely not a guy's idea of what a harem would be like.