Book Review: Neptune's Tears by Susan Waggoner.

Product details:
Publisher: Piccadilly Press
Paperback, 224 pages.
Release date: September 1st 2012
Rating: 2½ out of 5.
Ages: 12+
Source: Received from publisher for review.

It is love against the odds. There is his word, and there is hers. How can they feel so connected?

It is 2218 and Zee McAdams is in her second year as a healing empath at a busy London hospital. When a mysterious young man arrives for treatment, Zee's hard won calm is pierced. She will need all her courage if she's to follow her heart.

Especially when David reveals a devastating secret.

 Set in a futuristic London, Neptune’s Tears, the first in Susan Waggoner’s Timedance series introduces us to seventeen year old Zee McAdams who works as an Empath helping to ease the suffering of others.  Zee’s job requires total focus and dedication. She can’t have any distractions in life.  It would probably be for the best if she never fell in love, but Zee has never even come close to anything like that, so it doesn’t look as though falling in love is going to be something she has to worry about any time soon.

Then David walks into her life, and guess what? Zee falls head over heels in love with him. But there’s a problem. It turns out David is no ordinary guy. He’s an alien, and so the love between David and Zee is dangerous and forbidden. It must be hidden.  In Zee’s society aliens are eyed with suspicion.  A lot of people are convinced that these aliens who live amongst them are up to no good, that they are keeping secrets. And from the shady way that David acts whenever he’s around Zee, it looks as though they might be right.

The premise of Neptune’s Tears is an interesting one, but unfortunately everything that piqued my interest in the book, and all the elements I initially enjoyed in my reading of it – the futuristic society where people live their lives in the constant threat of terrorism and the part Zee might play in fighting that threat - were overshadowed by the all-consuming romance that dominates this book. It’s not that I’m not a fan of romance; I am, just not of the Insta-Love kind that’s portrayed here.  Zee and David’s was a relationship that didn’t really ring true for me and I found that it detracted from the plot which suffered from a lack of description and of world-building as a result.