This one had me on the edge of my seat from the beginning. Going to sleep and being an adult was hard when all i wanted was to know what Cia and Tomas were going to face next. ( )

I can't say this is a book I would have normally chosen for myself. I received it as part of the reddit book exchange with two others - Sweetly by Jackson Pearce and Marked by P.C Cast & Kristen Cast. I can tell you exactly why I wouldn't haven chosen it - the cover. The cover tells me that this book is not going to be very original and probably borrows heavily from other young adult post-apocalyptic books. It's a mix of Divergent, the Hunger Games and the Maze Runner, just looking at it.

I was right of course. I expected that I would find myself bored and uninterested, however, even though I did find many similarities to other novels and the plot did borrow quite heavily from others - I did become invested in the story. Sure, there were things that annoyed me. I found many of the characters names to be eye-rollingly terrible - at least our main character Cia (short for Malencia) made it out with a not so terrible name. Many of them just sound like futuristic names that are trying a little to hard, or are just purposely misspelled common names.

Anyway - Cia Vale is from the Five Lakes community of the United Commonwealth, which would be what is considered the Great Lakes area in the current US. This made me happy because I am originally from that area - hailing from Detroit, Michigan. I can still tell you all 5 of the Great Lakes. Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior (They spells HOMES - if you were wondering how they grilled it into our brains in elementary school). So she is from this small community which is not unlike Katniss' district 12 in that it is tiny and poor and generally dismissed by the rest of the population. At her graduation from school, Cia finds out that she has been chosen for the testing along with 3 of her classmates and they are off to the capital city to take a test and hopefully attend the university. Only - of course - the test is not like the test we take to get into college. It a battle for your life (in case you didn't see where this was going).

So like Katniss - Cia is taken to the capitol city. Like Tris she faces a series of challenges in order to be accepted into the University. Like Thomas she must battle her way through a maze to get to the other side. Like all of three of them - she makes it to the end of the novel and on to the next challenge because of course this is a trilogy. We'll see what the future holds for Cia in book two - Independent Study (which has to be one of the most boring title's for a book, ever).

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Review posted at SoManyBooksSoLittleTime ( )

If you've read Divergent and The Hunger Games you've basically read this book. It's been a while since I've read it and I don't want to subject myself to it again so that's about as in depth as I can get. This was just... not a good book. I'm almost curious how it even got published as it was basically just a rehashing and mashing of every other popular YA dystopian book. ( )

So...I started this one rolling my eyes and knowing I'd read it all before, but by the end, I stayed up till 1am on a school night (by which I mean, taking my 9yr old to school, I most definitely am NOT a young adult myself) and I added the second book to my wish list. Yes, it was a mash up of Divergent-meets-Hunger Games - girl is special and gets chosen, can't believe impossibly cool handsome every girl wants him manboy likes her, circle of friends made despite hardships,some fall, girl makes it through by being so impossibly clever/daring/brave/amazeballs and yay everybody loves her but...

Despite my cynicism and the familiarity of the general plot, I did enjoy it. It had more of the post-apoc aspects that these books often mention casually in passing and that I like to hear about - both before she leaves home and after, including a journey through a sanitised version of a post-apocalypse city, and discussion of growing food to live on in the ruined earth. I mean, it wasn't done incredibly well, but it was at least done. The civilisation was happy and the 'bad dystopia' bits were hidden from general population, which was better than, for example, the entire population agreeing to kill teenagers once they reach a certain age...

The characters were...okay. A bit nothing. Amusingly, with the film of Divergent being around at the moment, Tomas looked like Theo James in my head - but he has never looked like Four to me. The girl,um, Cia, was fine, same old. Bit annoying and naive, but having read this not long after The Forest of Hands and Teeth, at least she was vaguely likeable. Pointless friends were pointless, really.

Despite this, it flowed pretty well, didn't bog itself down in exposition too much (liked them making some of the back detail of apocalypse as test answers) and didn't spend too much angsty time bemoaning their fates - just got on with it and went from one 'action sequence' (please note it was not an action packed book) to the next. Once I'd disengaged brain and stopped comparing it to all the other ya dystopias out there, it was an enjoyably silly romp. If the sequel is reduced, I'll pick it up, if not, I'll live without it... ( )