This has been out for a while, but it didn’t really get on my radar until Justin McElroy recommended it on The Besties. At first, I was dubious because I thought “eugh, another dystopian novel where people are separated into castes? And by color this time? Sounds so heavy-handed. Like I read this already in Shades of Grey. Or every other YA novel in the past ten years where teen girls get sorted by some arbitrary trait and enter a love triangle.”

That happens, but it’s way better than you think. It’s like Hunger Games, Uglies, Harry Potter, and Leviathan Wakes all mixed together and the result is synergistic. I hate to compare this book to those, but we all stand on the shoulders of giants. It’s like the adult version of all those books. Mostly it’s about class conflict, but plot-wise it’s mostly about war. Brutal war. Taking the wargames of Hunger Games and Ender’s Game up to eleven.

This book knocked my socks off. I haven’t gotten lost in a story like this for a long time. Especially since I’m a writer and I examine everything with a critical eye, always through the lens of getting published, seeking out what makes books special. But somehow this book was able to disarm me. It’s just the sort of book I’ve always been looking for. I think males are going to get more out of it than females. Not that the female part is underrepresented, but because most of the book focuses on typically masculine things such as “women as motivating factor”, violence, war, tactics, brave hero that can’t seem to be able to do wrong, and so on. But if you’re into that, no matter what gender, then this is your book.