Justin Robinson

I hate to be one of those people who judge a book by its cover, so I generally completely ignore covers except to let me know what genre or sub-genre I might be dealing with. Even so, there's sometimes covers that are so atrociously bad that it starts seeping in and polluting my idea about what the book might be about, poisoning my desire to pick it up, or otherwise make me want to run, screaming, from the room.

FORTUNATELY, however, once I got beyond this really, really bad cover, I discovered a very decent story beneath. :) It's YA, but it's a very detailed and grounded YA that then turns into the fictional equivalent of an Ayn Rand love letter mashup with conformity ghouls and high-tech networking. :)

Cool, right? Well, I enjoy all of Rand's stuff, so that's not really a big deal for me, one way or another... and philosophy, especially when we add cameos of Stalin and the inanities of really stupid government policies based on fear and jealousy, can only be improved with a big adventure tale to destroy all the government and corporation ghouls who suck every spark of individuality out of the world. :)

Yay! Message! And it's fun. The best part has got to be the very deeply developed main characters and the solid grounding of the early settings. It was then extremely easy to jump right into the SF.

I totally recommend this for people who want ghoulish action with Objectivism. This is the kind of thing that fans of Goodkind would love as well. :)

Thanks to the author for a copy of this ARC!… (meer)

--Read my full review of the book at seriesousbookreviews.com! Spoiler Free!

**I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own and not influenced by my source.**

You don't have to be familiar with Toronto or even Canada to enjoy this novel. Sure, it's nice to be familiar with the setting for once (like I'm sure it is for people who live in NYC and read books set there). But Toronto is a modern city and that's what makes this setting so adaptable to readers anywhere.

I love smart fiction; especially fiction that takes our everyday modern world and challenges it by forcing something in our everyday life to the extreme. And it doesn't get much more extreme than the limiting of someone's right for the freedom of speech. It's what makes this book interesting for both teenagers, young adults and adults. The execution on this front is great and it really is something I haven't come across in YA in recent years.

This one took a while for me to get into. I'm all for establishing the setting and the characters, but I wanted a little more action or thrills earlier on in the story. Because the last half of the novel--where Terry actually starts to unveil the "evil" group--is a lot of fun to read and quite thrilling at times.

Terry is a great lead as well. She is smart and determined and willing to stop at nothing to save people's freedoms. It was refreshing not to have a lead who worried about popularity or one who was jaded from the past.

This story reminded me a bit of a mash-up between 1984 and The Walking Dead. But unlike the zombies in The Walking Dead where they want to eat your flesh, you get a group of people who want to create a horde of like-minded individuals who believe the world should be as uniform as possible (ideal utopia of 1984). While slow at the start, I enjoyed this story very much.

Check out more spoiler-free book and series reviews on my blog SERIESousBookReviews.com as well as read book series recaps!

Full Review: http://wp.me/p7hLUw-1Gn
Actual Rating: 3.5/5
… (meer)