Starters by Lissa Price
Delacorte Books for Young Readers
March 2012
My Rating:  ♥♥♥♥♥ (5/5)

Would you rent your body out to people who wanted to re-experience their youth… if you truly had no other choice?

Starters by Lissa Price is a new dystopian novel that takes place after a deadly virus hits mankind. The only survivors are those who managed to get the vaccination first – namely children and old people. Anyone not in those categories never had a chance.

In the aftermath, society is in shambles. Children who have no one to claim them as relatives are put in institutions – very unpleasant institutions where bad things happen. Teens and kids with nowhere to go are on the run, squatting in abandoned buildings, staying alive by scrounging up what they can to live. That’s how life is for 16-year-old Callie, her sickly little brother Tyler, and her friend Michael.

There is an option for those most desperate… a place called Prime Destinations that will pay teens to basically rent their bodies out to old people so that the old people can experience life in a young body again. Fear that she’ll lose her brother drives Callie to this desperate measure, and Callie signs a contract to rent her body out at Prime Destinations.

What sounds easy enough – going to sleep and waking up without any knowledge of what has passed in the last month or so – turns into a nightmare for her when she suddenly wakes up on the floor of a nightclub one evening before the rental period has ended. Thus begins a series of events that brings to light a web of deceit, murderous plots, and what could be the end for many many unclaimed minors, including Callie and those she loves the most.

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I couldn’t put Starters down from the moment I started reading it.  Callie’s messed-up world felt very real and believable.  Her fear of losing her brother, being put into an institution never to be heard from again, or starving to death was tangible.  Her desperation led her to do something terrifying – let a stranger take over her body, trust people she doesn’t know not to hurt or cheat her.

I loved Callie’s character – she was so easy to relate to!  I lost myself in her story, which was fast-paced and edge-of-your-seat, and found myself equally drawn into the lives of other characters in the book.  This is really a terrific young adult book and highly recommended!  If you liked The Hunger Games, you can’t miss this.

I was sad when Starters ended, but very glad to find out that this is only the first in the series.  I am most definitely left hanging and can’t wait to read the next book to be  released:  Enders.  That’s coming at the end of this year.  :)

www.lissaprice.com
www.startersbooks.com 

Buy it at Amazon.com.

Book source:  Digital PDF borrowed from NetGalley and returned after 90 days.  Amazon links are my affiliate links.

Wanderlove by Kirsten Hubbard
Delacorte Books for Young Readers
March, 2012
My Rating:  ♥♥♥♥ (4/5)

What It’s About:

Wanderlove is a coming of age story.  Bria is 18, has just had her heart broken, and is trying to move on.  She’s just graduated from high school and before heading to college for art (something she was supposed to do with her ex-boyfriend, by the way), she wants to travel.  She and her two best friends were planning on going together, but her friends ditch her at the last minute… something about her attitude not being healthy.  In a very un-Bria like move, she decides to go alone.

And so this is the story of her travels.  The tour group that she was supposed to travel with is a disappointment from the start – all older people who have little or no passion for their surroundings at all.  So when she comes across some backpackers, real travelers, she’s challenged.  Challenged to break away from the safe, comfortable, boring tour group and experience Europe in a way few have.  Of course she meets a guy, but she is so not looking for love on this trip.  She has heart healing that needs to happen.  Sometimes, though… these things are out of our control.

What I Thought:

There were so many things I loved about this book.  The characters are strong and very real, the setting is vividly shown, and it is really very well-written.  The romance was sweet and believable.  What I learned about life as a backpacker was fascinating!  There were some humorous travel lists, and Bria’s sketches in her journal (done by the author in real life) really added to the story.  BUT.  And this is a big but.  I was turned off by the bad language and crudity.  Some of the things described made me uncomfortable.  It felt like too much for a teen novel, though I do realize it’s an older teen novel.   It still felt like too much.  If that had been left out, this would have been a five-star novel for me.

Please note that the copy I read was an ARC, so who knows?  Some of that might be left out before publishing.  I hope so.  Find it on Amazon.com here.

Detailed Rating Breakdown:
Characters: 9/10
Plot:  9/10
Writing:  9/10
Creativity:  9/10
Cover:  10/10

Overall Rating:
♥♥♥♥ (4/5)

Parents’ Corner:
Violence
Moderate Cursing
Sexual Content
Drug/Alcohol Abuse

Book source:  Digital PDF borrowed from NetGalley and returned after 90 days.  Amazon links are my affiliate links.

Revealing Eden has an interesting premise.  First, it takes place in the future, when the world has been ravaged by global warming.  Many many people have died from what the sun has done to them, mostly those with the whitest skin, and now those that are dark-skinned dominate the earth.  Almost everyone lives underground for protection.  It’s so far into the future that white people are outcasts – some of them even cover their skin in a dark pigment so that they’ll look black.  In this world, only dark skin is beautiful.

This is where we meet Eden Newman, almost 18, white, and very unhappy about her skin and her so-called future.  According to the rules of society, she must marry (find a “mate”) by the time she’s 18 in six months or she’ll be left outside on the surface to fend for herself. 

“We cannot afford to supply precious resources to those who do not contribute to the continuation of our species.”

Eden works with her father, a brilliant scientist, looking for the answer to humankind’s problem – their susceptibility to the sun’s rays.  She has also refused the offers of more than one white man to marry her because she is holding out for something better, someone with darker skin.  And she has an idea of who that might be… someone who she thinks sees her for who she is.  But before anything can happen, her life  explodes into chaos.  The experiment has gone seemingly awry and she finds herself deep in the heart of the jungle on the run with the subject of the experiment, now a man-beast.

Let me tell you, it’s really hard describing this book to you – I don’t know how to tell about it without it sounding corny, and to tell you the truth, as I read it did feel more and more unrealistic.  It started out promising, but there were times when I was confused about where the plot was going.  Eden’s character was very hard to like as time went on, and there was really no logic to her decisions or inner thoughts.  Then when her dark-skinned boss gets turned into a beast-man (the science experiment was supposed to make a better human with different attributes of animals and immunity to the sun), the man that she hated suddenly becomes a man who she is deeply attracted to – for no reason at all (that I could see)!  He’s not nice to her, he is this weird furry beast (actually there never was a clear picture of what he looked like) but she can’t keep her eyes off of him.  I couldn’t understand why she was physically attracted to him, and as time went on their relationship just didn’t seem to develop.  Then the plot takes a turn and she finds out that there is someone who looked just like her in his life, and this look-alike might be in trouble.

And this… is where I had to stop reading.  I wanted to keep reading and see if it got any better, but it was reading more like a shallow romance novel than a character-driven dystopian novel.  The “romance” was all lust and no actual reason for romance, and that became the center of the story.

Now I can’t be all negative… one good thing about this book is that Eden learns what it is to be comfortable in your own skin, and that society doesn’t dictate what true beauty is.  Living life trying to be something you’re not is not life at all!  I did appreciate that aspect to the story.

Another thing, as I read I realized that this is supposed to be a twist on the classic story, Beauty and the Beast.  And what a good idea!  But it didn’t really work out (for me), unfortunately.  I stopped reading and am not even curious as to what happened in the end.  So sadly, I can’t really recommend this one.  BUT if you do want to read a good version of Beauty and the Beast, I recommend Beauty by Robin Mckinley.

In closing, I’ll share that there are quite a few rave reviews on Amazon for Revealing Eden - it seems people either love it or hate it.  If you want a quick, interesting read and the story appeals to you, you just might like it.   And if you do, feel free to share why here in the comments.  :)

Detailed Rating Breakdown:
Characters: 4/10
Plot:  6/10
Writing:  5/10
Creativity:  8/10
Cover:  8/10

Overall Rating:
♥♥ (2/5)

Book Info:
Revealing Eden by Victoria Foyt
Sand Dollar Press, October 2011
Buy it at Amazon.com

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Book source:  I received an ecopy of this book through NetGalley for review purposes.  The ebook will be deleted from my Kindle automatically after 30 days.  Amazon links are my affiliate links.