Has a good idea going but nothing really happens til the last few chapters. I still think it was a good quick read.

page-turner sci-fi with strong female main character; cliff-hanger ending so eager for the next volume

This book was great! Reminded me of The Hunger Games, with it's post-US setting, a girl main character wanting to know more about the world outside people don't know about (Away=District 13), etc.

Just a warning though: HUGE cliffhanger. And the next one won't be out until next year. Read at your own risk.

I made it about 70 pages into this book and it was so boring I couldn't keep reading. The summary sounded really interesting, but the book itself didn't live up to it.

Yhdysvaltojen ympärillä on näkymätön Raja (The Line), jonka tarkoituksena on suojella maata vihollishyökkäyksiltä. Samalla se kuitenkin rajoittaa kansalaisten kulkemista, sillä maasta ei voi poistua ilman poikkeuslupaa. Rachel asuu äitinsä kanssa kanssa Rajan lähellä, Tilalla (The Property), jossa rouva Moore kasvattaa orkideoja.

Rajan takainen alue on nimeltään yksinkertaisesti Poissa (Away), ja siellä asuvat Toiset (The Others), niiden ihmisten jälkeläiset, jotka muutama sukupolvi sitten jäivät Rajan väärälle puolelle. Toisista liikkuu hurjia huhuja, osassa tarinoista heidät kuvataan suorastaan hirviömäisinä olentoina, joilla on omituisia kykyjä. Rachel on aina ollut todella kiinnostunut Rajasta ja sen takaisista ihmeistä.

Hitaasti avautuvassa, lyhyessä romaanissa pääsevät ääneen monet sivuhahmotkin tuoden moniäänisyyttä tähän varsin erilaiseen dystopiaan. Maailmanrakennus on teoksen vahvuus, hahmot ja heidän väliset suhteet eivät niinkään. Harmillisesti kirjastolle ei ole hankittu kuin sarjan ensimmäinen osa, sillä tästä vasta tarina alkaa.

Interesting little post-apocalyptic/dystopian coming of age story. Teen-aged Rachel and her mother live on The Property, working for the elderly owner. The Property borders The Line, a storied section of the border between the Unified States and Away, which was cut off from the U.S. in a horrible battle with another country. Accounts of Away make it seem like an alien land, but Rachel is drawn to the adventure and mystery of the border, especially because of her mother's lesson plans, which are vaguely anti-government and suggest to Rachel that the people of Away aren't as bad, or unlike her, as official Government reports seem to indicate they are. One day, Rachel finds a mysterious recorded message that came from across the border, and adventure becomes inevitable.

Looking forward to the follow-up.

2.5 I guess. It was a fun, short read. However, the story lacked a lot, and it just didn't really make sense.

I don't understand why there are so many bad reviews for this book. It was a very quick read once I actually had the time to sit and read it, and I really enjoyed it. It was different than what I expected it to be based on the description and there were some very predictable moments, but I still liked it a lot. It did drag a bit while the history of the future world was explained, but it wasn't anything overbearing.

Interesting story...not the most well written book, but a good story. I will be reading the sequel!

Okay let's be honest, you don't care about a 10-year-old YA book you've likely never heard of, and I want to minimize the amount of additional time I give to this novel, so let's get right to it.

Where I need to cut the author some slack:

• This novel was published in 2010, when the technology in our daily lives was still on the cusp of big changes. I think this affected the way in which some of the technology in the book came across. Photographs (both moving and unmoving) were called 'digims', a voice recorder was 'corder'. It dates the novel in weird way and has the opposite effect as intended.

• Reading this novel in the buck-wild landscape of 2020, it's going to land differently than it would have in 2010, or even in 2015.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, here's what bothered me:

• Flat flat flat. The setting, the antagonistic forces, the characters we follow, the whole damn story. Considering this was published in the middle of The Hunger Games hype, it feels like a cash grab.

• Compared to other YA dystopian novels with a corrupt government, this novel had the lazy, sweeping 'Government Bad' tone of someone fresh out of an introductory sociology class. But again, when you're riding on the success of The Hunger Games, why try?

• The main character, Rachel, sometimes sounded like an 8-year-old, sometimes like a 13-year-old, and sometimes she had the emotional intelligence of someone in their twenties?? (By the end I gathered she was meant to be around 16?)

• The age discrepancy was felt most keenly in the scenes with Rachel and her mother. Sometimes they spoke to each other like equals and it was really weird, and then other times it was like the mother was speaking to someone very young.

• Within the first 50 pages, there were TWO chapters of literal history lessons through Rachel's mother quizzing Rachel. BAM! Worldbuilding, y'all!

• Chapters from the POV of the mother and two other characters are there purely to reveal things. No attempting to flesh out the characters, just plot points. Which can sometimes work well in thrillers when you're building tension, but that's not what the author has done here. There's no suspense to be found here.

• At one point,

Spoiler

Rachel, the girl who literally said how she wishes for anything to happen, who is obsessed with the land beyond the barrier, stumbles across a recorder with a mysterious voice recording asking for help, and what does she do? She pockets it and does absolutely nothing. Like yeah, the author set up why Rachel had to keep it secret, but there's no narration reflecting an internal conflict of wondering who it is, how she was able to find it, who she can trust to tell? It's not constantly there in the back of her mind while she attends to he other things she has to do??

• Let's get really nitpicky.

Spoiler

On page 89, Rachel disagrees with her mother in a sharp, painful way. Rachel is standing up for what she believes in, except... this is the first time we see Rachel feel strongly about anything. Her comment to her mother is there just to add drama and conflict. If the author wanted the moment to work, she would have had to show Rachel standing up for something else earlier on, showing her stance on justice and her relationship to it. Something that parallels the future conflict.

Where were your editors??

• Another nitpicky one.

Spoiler

On page 99, the author writes, "[Rachel] had never known how to feel about the fact that her own father had been a part of something that seemed so obviously wrong." Yeah cool, except we're nearly half way into this book, she's mentioned her father plenty of times, and during none of those moments has she said anything remotely like that?

But no, sure, bring it up right at the last moment we need to be told in order for Rachel's motivations to make sense.

• Oh, and last but certainly not least, we find out at the end

Spoiler

that the people on the other side of the barrier have developed super powers from hinted-at atomic bombing.

Wow, what an interesting and not at all out-of-left-field hook to get you wanting to read the sequel!