I received an eARC of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of this review



I really wanted to like this one BUT it didn’t happen!!!! Nirvana by J.R. Stewart was not at all what I expected it to be. I struggled to connect with the characters, understand the plot and fall into the dystopian world the author created. At first I thought it was just me. There are some really good reviews on Goodreads from some of my own friends. I realized 40% in that I was reading an old, unedited draft. I had the nice, new shiny copy on my kindle so I restarted it…..it still failed.

Larissa Kenders (Kenders from here on out because that’s what she goes by) is a seventeen year old punk rockstar. Yep you read that right. At 17, she’s famous for her music which was against “the man” and brought awareness to the bee extinction. I personally had a hard time liking and relating to this character. She’s already been to university, had a successful music career and is living with her fiancé….um….isn’t she just seventeen?! For me her character would have been more believable if she was older.

Spoiler

In the original draft she was 25 and doing these things. Not sure why the author felt the need to lower her age but leave the other characters and details the same.

OR if she’s 17, I don’t know, maybe doing 17 year old things like finishing high school, playing in her parents’ basement, that sort of thing.

But it wasn’t just Kenders that bothered me. It was the plot which was SO confusing. If I hadn’t read the old draft I really would have been completely lost. Kenders is living with her fiancé Andrew in a Hexagon complex, working in a Nirvana lab. Nirvana is a virtual reality experience and the peoples only escape to the world that no longer exists. With the extinction of bees, plant life died off and eventually the animals. Earth is a barren desert now. This premise originally drew me to the story. I was curious to see what occurred and how the bees died off, how humans are surviving. I can’t resist a good survival story, BUT that does not happen. The plot is more focused on the disappearance/death of Andrew and Kenders determination to find out what happened. The dystopian portion takes a backseat and the story feels more like a political message than an actual young adult dystopian.

Overall the story was just okay for me. I struggled and wound up having to force myself to finish it. As I finally got invested in the story and was actually excited to see what would happen, the author ends in an unnecessary cliffhanger, one that negates the entire plot of this book. The hidden message of the story, the inappropriate age of the main character (though not that the age is inappropriate her situation doesn’t match the age), and the lack of character development left me underwhelmed. I wouldn’t recommend this one….