TL;DR global warming has ruined everything and Atlantis used to be a thing
(not actually finished the second time, oops. Stopped reading 6/1/15)
I honestly don't know how to describe the book more than that. I read this book for the first time last April, and this re-read seems to be even more lackluster than the first time.
The narration is basically on par with The Selection, but I think it's even worse considering it's a 15-year-old boy who falls in insta-love and has a thought process more along the lines of a stereotypical 12-year-old girl. I don't know how else to put it other than that. Also, that's really surprising to me, considering the author is a guy. I don't really think anyone thinks the way Owen does regarding having crushes on someone they just met--not unless you're a YA heroine-- but it's kind of off-putting. I don't want to be all, "oh, he can't have a crush, he's a guy, that's such a girly thing," but the way he acts reminds me of a preteen girl obsessively fawning over a member of 1D or 5SOS, and that's creepy.
There's also way too much telling over showing. Camp Eden and EdenWest in general isn't introduced well in terms of visuals; Owen just lists off a bunch of details in a mini info-dump, and a lot of times it's in a string of simple sentences like an elementary school kid would write. (Not that elementary school kids are bad. I just think a 15-year-old would be a little better with describing things eloquently.)
The worldbuilding in general is also pretty weak. I don't care all that much about the science behind the global warming, but the HZ and the domes don't make all that much sense to me. (The science behind the radiation doesn't make sense to me, either, but I'm not a very science-y person, so I'm not really gonna talk about that part. I'm better with discussing geography.)
(via NASA website) The HZ would be the white area at the top (and I guess Antarctica, though it's not mentioned). I feel like it's not enough to support human life, and there's not enough to explain why it's habitable. There's no real explanation as to how the HZ sustains itself, nor how the domes outside the HZ manage to survive.
Speaking more of the domes: 6km wide isn't that big of an area at all.
I tried to center it around the White House. I think I was a little off.
I mean, now that I look into it a little more, sure, DC is about 4x the population of EdenWest. But DC is entirely city. There's nothing really sustainable about DC. Everything has to be brought in. If you dropped a 6km wide dome on DC, it would fail.
Page 33 of the paperback says that Lake Eden used to be part of Lake Superior, and somewhere else I think it says they're in Minnesota, so I put the circle over a Minnesota city on Lake Superior. Just for posterity.
Anyway, I don't think it's impossible for EdenWest to be completely self-sustainable, I just find it highly unlikely with the few details we've been given. Also, Camp Eden seems to be huge, and I think such a large "summer camp" place would cut into valuable city or farming space. The water takes up a significant amount of space, because at some point Paul asks, "Did you realize you'd [swam] over two kilometers from camp?" (pg 185). I don't even know how all of these kids are paid for. A good part of them seem to be Cryos, which would mean that their parents are long dead and they're basically wards of the state, and Owen and one other kid (Noah?) are "charity" cases. Do the camp counselors get paid? Is this their way of earning their keep? I don't know!
And I'm just gonna skip right over the logistics of making a 6km wide dome and its upkeep and how tall the dome has to be in the center vs the edges and how they keep everything uniform and--
okay. I think you get the point.
I accidentally kept the book a week past its due date because I returned half the batch of library books and forgot to renew the others, so I only made it to page 300 this re-read. I'm posting this because I've already read it and know what happens at the end.
The end was the least interesting part of the book for me, to be honest. From what I remember. I mean, my whole interest in the books was because of the Eden domes and the results of Owen's "spinning evolutionary clock" (pg 298). Once the plot starts to move in a different direction, I was like, "nah." I wasn't interested enough to continue reading the series even during my first read, and I think it's pretty unlikely for me to pick up the second book at this point unless I find it at the library and have a small stack of books at that point.
Honestly, I think The Lost Code would make more sense as a Middle Grade book. I think I would've enjoyed it more when I was younger (especially with a little more narration tweaking), but it's just not very exciting as a 17 year old. I don't know if that's a fault in the narration or plot, or if it's an age thing, or if it's because I'm more sensitive to these things now that I'm a writer myself.
TL;DR I thought it was pretty boring and unbelievable but it might keep you busy one afternoon if you're bored.
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