Look at that gorgeous cover. Seriously. The cuts that run through the face. The plants growing through the cuts. It. Is. Perfect.
So I chose a book by its cover again.
This book is dark. There isn’t a happy ending in sight. The closest anyone gets to a happy ending is dying before things get bad. It is that level of dark. It was just the right level for me. There is a scene that if you know your Holocaust history will just destroy you. It was just deeply disturbing and awful.
The basic plot is there is an illness that has caused a girls boarding school to be quarantined by the CDC. The girls were told to stay within the fence of their school and they would be helped. Of course, nothing is that simple in a YA book. There was medical experiments, a very brief f/f romance that seemed to come out of nowhere, complicated social rules, it was a great example of a good dystopian novel. It didn’t rely on the kids being drastically smarter and luckier than the adults. It didn’t rely on monologues to get across what was happening. There was no chosen one feel to it.
The characters were deeply flawed in ways that actually impacted the story. If Bryant wasn’t how she was, there is a huge chance that there would not have been the ending there was. Her one action changed the entire course of the novel in a way that I didn’t see coming. It just blew my mind that there really were no superfluous details and the flaws pushed the story instead of being “quirky” or forgotten about pretty much immediately. There was no girl that was too independent or strong for her own good. The MC was actually codependent with someone! There weren’t snarky come backs that really weren’t all that interesting.
I just loved this book. Once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. I read most of it in one day. I carried the book with me while I ran errands yesterday and then spent the rest of the day in bed finishing it. I needed to know what happen. That ending might have killed me though. I NEED MORE INFORMATION. This is not a complaint. The author actually made me care about what was happening. I want to know more. I would read more books in this universe and by Power.