My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Genre: YA Fiction, Dystopian, Sci-Fi, Christian
Synopsis:
Thalli has fifteen minutes and twenty-three seconds left to live. The toxic gas that will complete her annihilation is invading her bloodstream. But she is not afraid.
Thalli is different than others in The State. She feels things. She asks questions. And in the State, this is not tolerated. The Ten scientists who survived the nuclear war that destroyed the world above believe that emotion was at the core of what went wrong—and they have genetically removed it from the citizens they have since created. Thalli has kept her malformation secret from those who have monitored her for most of her life, but when she receives an ancient piece of music to record as her community’s assigned musician, she can no longer keep her emotions secreted away.
Seen as a threat to the harmony of her Pod, Thalli is taken to the Scientists for immediate annihilation. But before that can happen, Berk—her former Pod mate who is being groomed as a Scientist—steps in and persuades the Scientists to keep Thalli alive as a test subject.
The more time she spends in the Scientist’s Pod, the clearer it becomes that things are not as simple as she was programmed to believe. She hears stories of a Designer—stories that fill her mind with more questions: Who can she trust? What is this emotion called love? And what if she isn’t just an anomaly, but part of a greater design?
My Opinion: I really enjoyed this book! (I mean… It got five stars so that is kind of a given…)
Characters: Thalli is our MC, she is a seventeen year old who grew up suppressing her emotions. The others in her pod didn’t have them, and she knew she shouldn’t either. I related to Thalli on some levels, and on others not so much, but I got very attached.
Berk is a boy from Thalli’s pod. He left the pod a few years ago to be trained as one of the next Scientists. When Thalli is taken and scheduled for her Annihilation, Berk convinces his superiors to post pone it, saying that he wants to experiment on her. It doesn’t take long for the feelings of both Berk and Thalli to move beyond that of childhood friends.
The plot: (I will try to keep this spoiler free) The plot of this book was fairly slow moving, not super action packed but still interesting. One of the big plot twists I guessed right away, but that didn’t bother me. (I wish I had been wrong….*crying*)
I will definitely continue this series. Maybe not right now, but eventually. (My TBR is so long…)