- Dystopia books are all the rage – so I figured I’d check this one out.
I also recommend:
- Delirium by Lauren Oliver
- The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
Summary from GoodReads:
Sixteen-year-old Neva has been trapped since birth. She was born and raised under the Protectosphere, in an isolated nation ruled by fear, lies, and xenophobia. A shield “protects” them from the outside world, but also locks the citizens inside. But there’s nothing left on the outside, ever since the world collapsed from violent warfare. Or so the government says…
Neva and her best friend Sanna believe the government is lying and stage a “dark party” to recruit members for their underground rebellion. But as Neva begins to uncover the truth, she realizes she must question everything she’s ever known, including the people she loves the most.
My Review:
With Dark Parties, Sara Grant jumps on the dystopia train and offers her version of a future that might be. Neva lives in a dome, a place where people are disappearing, where the calendar has been reset to 01/01/01 and where life’s luxuries, things we take for granted today, are disintegrating quickly.
Honestly, the book was okay. But just that – okay. I kind of felt as if Sara Grant took a stock “this is the outline for dystopia” booklet and filled in the blanks with her own special tweaks (in fact, a part of the book made me wonder if she was intending to just outright rip part of George Orwell’s 1984 ideas out of his book and make them her own). The world was not put together very well, I mean, it was okay, it was a world, but there wasn’t much detail and it was sort of like reading the text equivalent of standard background painting in a low-budget film.
It’s funny, but as I write this review I wonder exactly why I had a hard time putting the book down. I think the answer is that it was entertaining fluff. Just enough interesting material to keep me from wanting to put the book down, but not enough to fill me up with yummy book goodness. In fact, the book really started getting interesting just as it ended – which made me a bit upset. Although the ending wasn’t as bad a cliffhanger as has become quite the fashion, it still was enough of one to let me know that there would be more.. and I’m ready for stand alone books to make their way back into fashion again.
So, long story short, interesting enough book, will scratch the itch if you want to read yet another dystopia novel, but if you are picking and choosing your way through them, this is one you might want to put on the “maybe one day” pile.
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