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Four women; a biologist (the narrator), a psychologist, an anthropologist, and a surveyor, are sent into Area X as the twelfth expedition team. Their purpose is to map the area and make observations, all while trying not to be affected by the area itself. The biologist volunteered because her husband was part of the eleventh expedition.

The narrator gets infected very early on by inhaling spores and tries to cover it up. While she continues the investigation she learns that the psychologist is hypnotizing the three of them, that there had been more than eleven expedition teams before them, and that there’s some kind of life form deep underground.

While this novel was good, it felt incomplete. It’s the first in a trilogy, which might explain why the story is left dangling. The biologist is the only survivor of the expedition and she chooses not to return to the border, but instead to follow in her husband’s footsteps.

I found the dangling storyline frustrating. I wanted to know what the alien was, why it was there, when did it arrive, is it actually an alien, how drastically the biologist changes, and how those changes affected her. Maybe those answers are in the next few books.

In the story, the biologist encounters a massive pile of journals but doesn’t inform the reader of what she’s read, which is a pet peeve of mine. I wanted to know what was in those journals, how far back did they go, how many different people wrote in them, and why they were in a huge pile. I understand that this narrator is unreliable, but still, this was frustrating.

Overall the novel was good, it was an interesting peek into a mysterious zone, but irritatingly incomplete.