The Reading Shelf

This is a debut and a book that I haven’t heard much about, so I came into it fairly blind, which seems to be pretty rare now that I’m part of the book blogging community. I had hoped that this would work in this book’s favor, but unfortunately it didn’t.

Things started off alright. They could have been better – I would pretty confused as to how the world worked and if they were in America (apparently they’re on another planet? Something?), so that cooled my interest in continuing – but I was reading and I was mildly interested in knowing what would happen next. Unfortunately, the further I read, the less interested I became.

I just didn’t care about Elissa enough. She was freaking out about everything (often for a good reason, but still) and I could tell that a character she “hated” would probably become the love interest and her mother was villain-ified or whatever and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I just didn’t care enough for Elissa to find out what was going on.

Would I have liked this book better if I knew what was going on with their society and such and wasn’t so confused? Quite possibly, yes, but I think the fact that I had trouble connecting with the main character was the biggest thing against this book. Perhaps you’ll enjoy it more if you like futuristic sci-fi stuff where everything isn’t all clear from the beginning, you might like this, but if you’re like me and would like to at least kind of understand how the futuristic stuff does and does not work before being thrown right into it, you might not be a fan.