M. Savage wakes up in a coffin. She can’t actually remember her name, but that’s the name on the nameplate at her feet. She’s wearing clothes that are about three sizes too small and there are no adults in sight. As other kids start to wake up around her, Em takes charge and quickly becomes the leader. With no water and no food, their situation quickly becomes desperate. What Em and the others don’t know, is that finding food and water is the least of their problems.
So this book was basically a combination of The Maze Runner 
and Lord of the Flies. The reader is confused for virtually the whole book, but then again, so are the characters. We don’t know what’s going on, we don’t know who these kids are, we don’t know where these kids are. That kind of thing might work for some people, but it rarely works for me. I just don’t like feeling confused! I can’t concentrate on enjoying the characters, the writing, and the story when I’m just trying to figure out what the heck is going on with the plot. I thought the idea of people who emotionally and mentally are twelve-years-old in older (late teen to early twenties?) bodies was kind of weird…it just seemed like a strange premise. I felt like it didn’t really add much to the story. The author would have been better off choosing an age group instead of trying to use two at the same time.
The beginning was very slow to grab me. I didn’t find myself connecting with the children or really caring if they survived or not and there were a few too many “main” characters for me to keep track of. There wasn’t a lot of character development. I think this is mostly because the characters themselves have no memory, so the reader can’t connect with any of their past experiences. They all just felt flat and very one-note to me.
Overall, this book was just alright. It lacked world-building, which, again was probably caused by the lack of character memories. I thought the book would have been better if it had been written in the third person. Then it could have incorporated flashbacks of the characters pre-whatevertheheckisgoingon as well as scenes from the perspective of characters that we meet later in the book. I think that way the characters could still have been confused, but the reader wouldn’t have been. After finishing this first book, I feel no interest in reading a second.
Overall Rating: 2
Language: None
Violence: Extreme. A lot of fighting, a lot of gore
Sexual Content: Mild
Smoking/Drinking: None
Note: I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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