The Pearl Savage: Savage, #1

By Tamara Rose Blodgett

"I was hooked, right from chapter 1!! ~ HarlotReviews

"... fresh and original - I've never read anything like it."
"...an interesting and engaging read.

For fans of The Outlander and written by New York Times, USA TODAY and #1 Dark Fantasy bestseller Tamara Rose Blodgett, comes a tale of criminal geneticists who interfere with predestined matches between the women and men of an unforgiving post-apocalyptic world.

Synopsis:
Clara Williamson is a princess living in a dark post-apocalyptic future of bio-spheres fashioned to protect 1890s America. A time when marriages are arranged for things other than love.

When her sadistic mother betroths her to an abusive prince from a neighboring sphere to secure their future in illicit trade, Clara determines to escape.

Leaving a life of familiar terror behind, she embraces the dangers of Outside that no one from the spheres has seen in nearly a century and a half. Clara escapes tyranny only to discover the sphere-dwellers are not the only people who survived the cataclysmic events of one hundred forty years prior.

She finds herself trapped, unable to return to the abusive life of the sphere while facing certain danger

Outside. Can Clara find love and freedom with the peril that threatens to consume her?

Full-length novel. Omnipresent narrative.

• Language: English
• Publisher: T. Rose Press LLC
• Release date: Mar 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781458010650

Reviews for The Pearl Savage

[allcrazyhere · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I almost put this book down. I really did. The grammatical mistakes and the way the author strung the words together just didn't do it for me, and that hurt me a lot. I like my books to be well put together, with very few grammatical mistakes in them. The idea behind this one, though, kept me continuing even as I looked at it with trepidation.

I'm very glad I did. The story itself, the concept of it, is an intriguing one. There are so many dystopian novels out there right now about what could happen to the world, but this one was a whole new brand of different for me. I won't give anything away in this review, but the way that this author wrote about a possible future involving the specifics that she did was commendable. I ended up enjoying the book so much, I got the rest of them as well. I look forward to reading the continuation of Clara's story, even if I do have to look past the grammar to do it.

[princess0starr · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This is what I get for randomly putting on free or cheap ebooks on my Kindle without previewing them first. Of course, you really can’t tell how good or bad a book’s going to be until you’ve read, but still. After finishing this, I wanted to slap myself.

First off, this is so boring that I ended skimming the last quarter of the book just to get to the end. I don’t care about any of these characters. They’re all the same stereotypical YA dystopia/paranormal/fantasy-esque leads—plain girl who’s super special and needs protection; Love Interest 1, a douchebag; Love Interest 2, nice guy who turns into a douchebag; and the jilted best friend who ends up as Love Interest 3. (Because a love triangle just isn’t enough in this book.) And the writing. This is ultraviolet prose at its worst. I’m assuming that the overtly flowery language is supposed to be a result of the antiquated society, but it’s just awful and stilted. And this isn’t even adding in the massive abuse of ellipsis’s and italics, used almost to the point of parody. (And I’ve been guilty of italic abuse.) It’s the weakest possible way of writing conflict and tension, and honestly, the author should have gotten a decent editor to look over this.

The world-building is weak. There’s a quasi-steampunk society of spheres that used to be the United States, constructed during a massive meteor strike in the 1890s. I could possibly run with this. except it feels more like an excuse to shove the heroine into pretty dresses. But then we find out that there’s two societies of ‘savages’ (*seethe*) living in the outside world. And one of the societies has a modern way of living with nice houses and community centers and democracy and nice clothes, but they’re not as nice as the ones in the sphere. And the other outside society is a band of pillagers. What pisses me off here is that there is no difference between either one of the two ‘main’ groups aside from outside appearance. This is supposed to pick up a hundred and forty years after the prologue scene, and both groups conveniently have a similar culture and manners of speaking? Oh, and by the way, using overly flowery archaic language is not the default speaking pattern for time periods pre-late 20th century. I can somewhat excuse the use of it in the sphere, but the use of it in the 1890 flashback is WRONG. You can’t put any old fashioned language into a certain time period, just because “Oh, well, it’s old-timey!” And why do the people living on the outside have the exact same way of speaking? Even coming from the same source, the differences in the culture would have differences in the speaking patterns and terminology. And yes, there is more than enough time for cultural differences to emerge. (Sorry, doing research on the 1890s right now /research rage.)

But research fail is not why I hated this book.

So, the plot of this book is that the one major clan—the civilized one—is looking to negotiate an exchange with the people of the spheres for women to breed with the clansmen. And they would really like some for the members of the Band, who all inexplicably have gills despite being inland. Oh, and Love Interest #1 spies on the super special Princess being abused and wants to protect her from her abusers, and Love Interest #2 is a misogynistic abusive jackass who wants to take Princess Mary Sue and show her who’s really in charge.

I’m surprised at myself that I didn’t give up at this point.

So, Princess Mary Sue tries to run away from her abusive mother, and manages to nearly get raped by her just-as-abusive fiancé, and in turn, gets kidnapped by the Band and faints. *seethe* She then wakes up in a perfectly nice four-poster bed and learns that the savages aren’t quite so different after all, ‘Colors of the Wind,’ learns that women are supposed to be delicate fucking flowers who can’t even defend themselves and are only good for popping out babies. She and one of the other women go to bath in the woods with the misogynistic asshole, who decides that this is his chance. And then we find out the Princess’s real super-special ability: she’s referred to as a select. Which means that any member of the Band who comes in contact with her is so fucking overcome with their hormones that they essentially molest her and she just stands there and does nothing. And it gets fucking better—the end of this book is the ENTIRE Band lining up to sexually assault this girl, who just stands there and lets them do whatever they want, with the entire community watching and deciding which one member is most suitable for her to mate with.

FUCK. THIS. NOISE.

Fuck this book. I’m not even touching on the absolute fail on the abuse that crops up in the characters’ past—trust me, that pissed me off too—but good fucking God. We do not need another YA book that tells girls to be doormats and let guys do whatever they fucking want because “It’s hormones!” and that the only thing a woman is good for is her vagina. And not to mention, this is fucking sexual assault this girl is going through, and it’s fucking okay with everyone? Because it’s for the greater fucking good? NO. NO NO NO NO.

Oh, and there’s a sequel hook at the end that deal with fucking mermaids that barely gets explained. I’m not bothering, and you shouldn’t even bother with this book. Fuck this book.

[aaron_lewis_79 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I almost left the back cover summary out because it doesn’t do The Pearl Savage justice. Form the pitch The Pearl Savage comes off as a love square with some other stuff possibly going on in the background, and at first I was dubious about reading it. Thankfully, the story was captivating and so much more than the cover lead me to believe.The backdrop was classic sci fi without being stale. A world in cataclysm saved just in the nick of time but forced to self contained spheres to survive. The only problem: not everyone can fit in the spheres, so some people get left out to die while the rest of the population scuttles off into their hiddy holes. Fast forward a hundred plus years, and it turns out that not all the people who were left for dead actually died, so now there are two societies the one inside the spheres and the one outside the sphere. In a story full of plot twists and secret agendas the two worlds collide.As someone who likes a little violence in what I read (and what I write) the nitty gritty nature of the relationships was a great. There was a lot of substantial tension between all of the characters, and by the end of the third chapter I'm proud to say I truly hated some of them (always a good sign). An added bonus was that the various types of abuse the characters had to go through were realistically portrayed adding a tragic bite to the story.The third person narrative was also a refreshing change of pace. Instead of limiting the narrator to focusing on one individual’s experiences the narrator was free to roam. It gave the story a fuller feeling, and allowed the reader to have a better picture of what was really going on. Thankfully, that didn’t mean that The Pearl Savage was transparent, but rather that the plot twists had to be hidden in such a way that they came as a genuine surprise not only to the reader but to the characters as well.Once it’s all said and done, I’m excited to see where Clara’s story goes and what type of woman she evolves into.