Plot:
What if everything came down to a single test? If your life was defined at seventeen, could you handle it? Could you accept your fate leaving the ones you love, or would you risk it all and stay?
One test stands between Vanessa and Central. One chance to make the leap across the walls to a better life. At seventeen, Central considers Vanessa an adult. Her labor role, marriage, and housing divisions will be dictated by her performance on the leap.
Dedication and unfaltering friendship has bonded Vanessa to Garrett as they fight for their chance to leap into Central. But what happens when love overtakes reason? When defiance in the name of love creates an unintentional fracture in their nation.
Without warning Vanessa is at the mercy of the nation that’s supposed to protect her. Exiled and abandoned she must fight but she find’s she’s not alone. With her heart divided she seeks her revenge, but will her stand be enough? At seventeen, Central considers Vanessa an adult. Her labor role, marriage, and housing divisions will be dictated by her performance on the leap.
Review:
Ruination is a great book for fans of the Hunger Games, Divergent, and Matched trilogies, and has themes that are similar in nature. Right away, the world that Amanda Thome created reminded me of those three series, in a way that was familiar yet new. For example, the story takes place in a world that is divided into three sectors, Central, Inner and Outer, similar to The Hunger Games districts. Residents can move up from lower sectors to the higher sectors with the Leap testing, which also decides what jobs and marriages the citizens will have, similar to the matching process in Matched.
One thing that I loved about this book is that while the world felt very familiar, I never knew what was going to happen and was constantly being surprised. Just as I thought that things were going to happen one way, I would be completely surprised by a new plot point.
The characters were all pretty well developed, and the chapters primarily switched between the narrations of Nessa and Ty. There were one or two chapters in the middle narrated by Garrett that I found a bit out of place, as they neither moved the story along nor added any real insight. At first it was a bit difficult to tell who was narrating each chapter as there were no titles like there are in books like Allegiant by Veronica Roth, but after a while it became very easy to tell who was narrating each chapter.
I really enjoyed the fast pace of the story and found it to be a quick read throughout the whole story. I was kept on the edge the whole time I was reading and couldn’t wait to finish because it was such a gripping story.
In general, there were a few punctuation errors, like random hyphens in the middle of words, but I just attribute that to it being an ebook, where I always seem to find minor formatting issues. Not that big of a deal, but I still found myself being slightly annoyed every time I came across such an error.
I give this book a solid 4/5 stars.
The author is also holding a contest to have a character in book two named after two lucky winners.