When I saw this book was up for grabs for just 99p on Kindle, I jumped at the chance to read it! I have read two other books by these authors a few years ago and was really impressed. When there are cliff hangers at the end of every chapter, you just have to keep reading!
The authors of the book are twin sisters and they like to write about twin sisters in future dystopian settings. Dystopia settings are usually very tense, and they can really draw you in.
In this particular book set in the near future, there has been a devastating earthquake in LA, and the area is now populated primarily with people living in tents and motor homes rather than buildings. These people are dubbed The Unfortunates.
A select few people are picked out from the Unfortunates to live in Damon Yates’ academy, which is a mansion and its sprawling grounds. These are the Fortunates.
Twin sisters Crystal and Jade were once taken in by Yates, but a group of Fortunates decided to break free of their ties to Yates and become Exiles. Jade was one of these exiles, while Crys remained with Yates. And now the sisters are on opposite sides of a class war.
Things get interesting when one of the Fortunates goes missing, and Crys dons a disguise only to find the missing girl dead in the Exile’s hideout.
I’m going to admit that I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed their first publication. My main complaint with this one, and I probably shouldn’t be saying this but I am, is that I found the writing too mature.
I know a lot of people prefer mature writing because of its richness, but at first, I felt the writing was too convoluted and lacked a good flow.
However, by the time I got about a third of the way through, I started to really get into it, and enjoy the descriptors.
The novel features plenty of action, subterfuge, betrayal, personal agonies and collective missions. Not to mention high-tech gadgets like drones, nanobots, and 3D printed guns. And toward the end of the book, the story becomes much greater than the exiles themselves.
The characters are well depicted, and you get a good feel of each one. You read the story from multiple points of view, which really helps to bring the story together.
One character uses the pronouns “they” and “their”. I found this confusing at first, thinking 2 characters were being referred to rather than just one, but I soon got the hang of it.
There were plot holes, and things that seemed unrealistic, but this didn’t bother me – when it comes to fiction, I’m not overly concerned about realism.
There we some HUGE twists at the end of the book that I did not see coming. And the very end made it clear what the next mission for the exiles, in the second book of the series.
As much as I enjoyed this book, I won’t be reading the next book in the series. But this is only because there are so many other books I want to read instead in the next coming months!
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