V. Casa: Vaieon

In her debut novel, Casa shows the strength of a woman who finds herself in the most unlikely place:

Lily is living a normal life with her husband and children until one night she feels her body falling, being pulled away. When she awakes, she find herself in the strangest place, first thinking it is a jungle but the plants don’t match and certainly the creature she just saw doesn’t match either. Lily has somehow found herself in the Cretaceous Era. This is her tale of survival and trying to find a purpose in this new Era. 

This is Casa's debut novel and I have to applaud her with taking the road less traveled. Many debuts that I read tend to be in safer genres, where there is more readily available avenues for inspiration for their book or ideas of how things should/could unfold. Personally, I have not read too many time travel books and secondly, I have never read one where the individual is taken back to the Cretaceous period.

This is very much character driven novel, so if you do not like character driven novels this will not be for you, but I think you would be missing out on a great character. Lily is really well written in this book, you feel her struggles especially at the beginning as she attempts to come to terms with where she is, even though she does not know how it happened. Honestly, I probably would have freaked out a lot more than she did. It was interesting to watch her adapt in order to ensure her survival but at the same time questioning whether she wanted to live as well, she contemplates a few times that being eaten may be a mercy for her. You really feel for her when she is missing human interaction. 

I really appreciate that Casa had the dinosaurs have some form of intelligence and that they were not as mindless beast as we often think they are or portrayed in some media. They are able to form bonds, within and outside of their species and I think that Casa did a great job in highlighting this. Baby Boy, was just a treasure in the story, and I look forward to the scenes with "him" especially at the beginning.

So the time travel aspect is never really explained in this book. There was this weird scene in the middle of the book, with, I don’t even know, what that was but it was supposed to explain how Lily ended up there, but honestly it just confused me more than anything. I think I would have preferred Lily not being able to ever figure out the time travel aspect, as she never really focuses on the ability to get home. She does accept that this is to be her life now fairly quickly.

This was a good debut novel, and after messaging with the author, it is going to be a series, which I was happy to hear (that ending I still had quite a few questions). For sure one to check out if you like survival books, character driven books and dinosaurs (but not the dino erotica phase that happened a few years ago).

Enjoy!!!

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