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!