Archetype: A Novel

“. . . this is a fun beach read; the next book (due in October) is something to look forward to for the reader content to let a few things go in the interests of a fast, action based story.”

“You don’t understand yet, but you will.”

That statement from early in Archetype is prescient of the experience of reading M. D. Waters’ exciting new novel.

Emma Burke is a woman at a loss. After an accident that she does not remember, she wakes in a hospital room to find a husband of whom she has no memory. Maybe more importantly, she has a voice in her head that tells her not to trust him. She also has dreams and vague memories of a past spent challenging the dystopian world in which she lives, and a great love that she’s lost.

Author Waters’ worldscape starts straight out of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: a world of reduced fertility, few women, and masculine control of both.

She early on tosses in a touch of Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives when Emma meets wives like her who are clearly struggling to be perfect models of femininity.

We have a world war out of any apocalypse book, and the stereotypical love triangle out of any YA novel since Twilight.

Fortunately for Waters, she has the writing chops (in most of the book) to make the story an homage to these other books rather than derivative drivel.

Her dialogue, aside from Emma’s tiresome way of speaking without contractions, is interesting and revelatory without resorting to info dumps. Her characters are well-developed, and she does a nifty job at making the voice that Emma hears in her head clearly different from Emma’s thoughts or her own speaking voice.

The story moves at a sprightly pace, from Emma’s waking to the ultimate showdown in the “hospital.” Waters moves deftly from her derivations on Atwood and Levin to her own futurescape, defining Emma’s world as something else altogether different from those other novels.

Waters has a few problems with use of language (“My hand reached” (What else can reaches?); “His smile lengthened” (What does that mean?); and a male protagonist is described as “slim but broad” )a seeming impossibility); and a weird obsession with how things smell—“musk” was used often and not well.

The biggest weakness is in the sex scenes. Plummy and overdramatic, with a scandalous overuse of “smoldered” and “throbbing,” they are something to skim past on the way to the good stuff: Waters’ action scenes. Those are exciting, clear, and extremely well drawn. Even the obligatory love triangle is made bearable by having two male protagonists who are clearly desirable, rather than one clear choice.

The first of a proposed two-book story, Archetype is an exciting novel in need of a little editorial brushing up. Sure, the science is wonky, the sex straight out of a fan fiction (without that, this book would sit squarely in with popular YA novels like The Hunger Games and Divergent), and the heroine a little too prone to getting the vapors over a set of broad shoulders. But even so this is a fun beach read; the next book (due in October) is something to look forward to for the reader content to let a few things go in the interests of a fast, action based story.