Ruth Silver (1)

Dead Girl Walking was a fantastic book to read I was hooked from page one. Princess Ophelia is the main character she is killed suddenly when she escapes the castle at night to meet the boy she loves secretly as her father would not approve and the fact that she is already betrothed to someone else but she does not love him.
She comes back from the dead as Leila the Grim Reaper, this in itself is a fantastic idea as I have never read of a female Grim Reaper and she isn't the only Grim Reaper either, there is a team of them and they help her learn the ropes of what her job now entails. There is one in particular who falls for 'Leila' straight away Wynter.
Leila has so many questions about what happened and the how's and why's and will she leave her past life behind her?
Absolutely brilliant, fast pacing and well written. I look forward to reading more from Ruth Silver in the future.
… (meer)

I had high hopes for this book based on the cover and the description, and it started off good, but it kind of lost me after that. Olivia and Josh live in a dystopian society where, because women are infertile, everybody is matched up by the government to be married at the age of 18, and entered into a lottery to choose who will be able to conceive via artificial means. Olivia and Josh are best friends who are matched, but on their wedding night, Olivia is arrested and thrown in jail. She has no idea what is going on until they also arrest her mother, who tells her that she got pregnant naturally with Olivia and had her in secret, which is unheard of. Josh and his mother break Olivia out of jail and they go on the run with the help of a band of rebels.

I liked Olivia and Josh well enough, until they got to the city of Haven, which was the home of the rebels. There they were separated and told that they couldn't be together, and their marriage wasn't recognized as legal. They also told Olivia that she had 3 years to pick a husband (anyone but Josh) and have a kid, or they would pick for her. My problem with this is that Josh just went along with it, after going to all the trouble to break Olivia out of jail! Then stuff happens (no spoilers) and they have to go on the run again, which doesn't seem to bother them at all! So, they kind of became more and more unlikeable as the story went on. I didn't care for the ending, either, so there was that. Basically, I didn't enjoy this book as much as I hoped I would.

3 out of 5 stars.… (meer)

This book read like a mashup of popular YA series of the last few years. Take a little Hunger Games, throw in a bit of Divergent, mash up other various tropes, blend, and serve. That could have been okay except that nothing fit together smoothly. Things happened because they happened, not because the plot supported them.

There were also huge, gaping plotholes. The basic premise of this book is that Olivia was born naturally, as in, her mom and dad had sex and nine months later there she was. It's suspected that Olivia will be able to have children this way, too. This is exciting and makes her valuable/puts her in danger, because no one else can have children like that. Then it becomes "something something plague vaccine go to a lab Day of the Chosen something." There's even a scene where Olivia and her husband (assigned to her by the government, natch) are talking and she says to him that her mother was worried they would "try" for a baby. He does not understand what she means by try. Now, even if people can't reproduce sexually why on earth would they stop having sex? Are we really supposed to believe that? And since the entire book is resting upon that, well...

(Provided by publisher)… (meer)