Author: Rory Power
Genre: Young adult
Release Date: July 9th, 2019
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Source: ARC won from Bookish First which did not influence my opinion
My rating: 2.5 stars
Synopsis:
It's been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put under quarantine. Since the Tox hit and pulled Hetty's life out from under her.
It started slow. First the teachers died one by one. Then it began to infect the students, turning their bodies strange and foreign. Now, cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for themselves on their island home, the girls don't dare wander outside the school's fence, where the Tox has made the woods wild and dangerous. They wait for the cure they were promised as the Tox seeps into everything.
But when Byatt goes missing, Hetty will do anything to find her, even if it means breaking quarantine and braving the horrors that lie beyond the fence. And when she does, Hetty learns that there's more to their story, to their life at Raxter, than she could have ever thought true.
My Review:
I was really excited about this one. I mean, the cover, the synopsis, it just all sounded really good. But it took so long for anything really to happen. And then, when it did, it wasn't really anything that exciting. It was about a third of the way through, and I got excited, but then, really nothing happened. We never really find out for sure what caused what they had. Or what the people in the world outside were doing. Had this actually affected the outside world? I'm guessing not. And what kind of experiment were they even doing? There were so many different offshoots of the story, and at the end when we start finding things out, they don't all fit in, and something about climate change was inserted as if they were trying to make the story about that or something, but it all just really didn't add up to anything. The ending was very inconclusive, not sure exactly what happened. It was also kind of hard to feel much for the characters, honestly, they weren't really relatable, and nothing about them made me even that sympathetic to them. I'm sorry to say this one is the first book in a long time I've rated below a 3. As I saw another person say, if I hadn't really kind of had to review this, I probably wouldn't have actually finished it. But I just kept hoping the final answers would make all of the story worth it. Unfortunately they did not.
