Tag: ruination

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Book Reviews

Resignation – Book Review

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Plot:

What would you do if your heart was torn between saving yourself or your first love? For Nessa that question is a reality. If she is not surrendered to Central in a week, then Garrett will be executed and war will ensue.

Countless lives rest on the shoulders of eighteen year old Nessa. Is she strong enough to surrender herself to the government that’s holding Garrett hostage? Can she sacrifice the life she’s built to save him? Life comes down to a series of decisions, the question is; could this be her last.

Review:

Resignation is the second book in the Worlds Apart series. My review of the first book, Ruination, can be found HERE.

After falling in love with the world of this story and the characters in Ruination, I was quite excited to get my hands on an ARC of Resignation so I could continue where the first book had left off. Needless to say, as soon as this book found its way into my email inbox, I downloaded it and started reading it right away, that’s how excited I was to get a copy of this.

After all of the chaos that happened at the end of the first book, Nessa has a lot weighing on her mind. She must make a decision to either stay with the boy that she loves, Ty, or go and surrender herself to Central and her former government to save not only her first love Garrett, but the people outside of the divide as well.

While Nessa knows that Ty wouldn’t want her to risk her life trying to save Garrett, she knows that it is the right thing to do. A squad of badass members from outside the divide is formed to get Nessa into Central so that the squad can rescue Garrett as well as some other people who had gone on a mission to Central six years prior never to return.

Of course, nothing ever goes quite as planned and with some plot twists that even I did not see coming, everything gets flipped upside down. The real shock comes at the end of the book, yet again leaving me anticipating the next book in the series.

I give this book 4.5/5 stars.

Resignation goes on sale March 9, 2014. You can preorder it from Amazon.

Categories
Book Reviews

Ruination – Book Review

worlds apart

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.