I received this novel as an advanced copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I try to vary the content of my novels. I don’t want to read too many novels from the same genre in succession because it makes me bored, and I feel like I’m unable to judge each book based on its merits. That’s why I waited some time before I read this dystopian fiction. Anyways, here is my review:
A mysterious virus reduces the birthrate of female infants to less than 1 percent. Medical science and governments around the world scramble in an effort to solve the problem, but even after 25 years, there is no cure. An entire generation grows up with a population of less than a 1000 women. Zoey and the surviving young women are housed in a research compound that is dedicated towards finding a cure. For 2 decades, she’s been kept away from her family, treated as a test subject. All she knows is that the virus has wiped out the rest of the world’s population. But Zoey is determined to escape before the next set of tests, a program from which no woman has ever returned. Finding her way to freedom will take brutality, strength, and cunning —but Zoey is ready for war.
If I have to describe this novel with only one word, it would be ordinary. I didn’t hate this novel. There was nothing terribly wrong with it. Did it have some holes in its logic? Yes, but I’ve read other dystopian novels that also raised some questions. Did it have action? Yes, more so towards the middle and end of the novel. What this novel didn’t have is a unique component, something that makes it stand out in mind from everything else in the genre. I didn’t really care much about the characters because there just wasn’t anything to draw me to them. The beginning of the book sounded like The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – only not as well-written. Right now, I’m trying to come up with something interesting to write about this novel but I’ve got nothing. It’s not a terrible novel by any means but it has nothing new to offer and for that reason, it is unmemorable. Maybe it’s my own boredom from reading about the same crisis of not-enough-women-to-populate-the-planet, but I struggled to get through this book. It just didn’t work for me.
Happy reading ~
Completely agree with your review, I really wanted to love it but there just wasn’t enough to make it really stand out.
Exactly!! I feel like the whole virus-fertility theme has been so overused that there really needs to be something new that is brought to the table to get me to want to like or read a novel. It would be cool to have an author turn the tables and have men be the ones who are imprisoned and tested upon, and that’s just the most obvious twist that could be added.
Exactly!