Review Detail

This book beautifully translates the hardships of growing up and finding out that adults don’t know everything to the post-apocalyptic world. Deuce has grown up thinking that the Elders are infallible and they only have the enclave’s best interests at heart, but when she learns something that will endanger the lives of the entire enclave, the Elders ignore and then punish her and she is left to make sense of the Topside to which she has been banished. Her entire world has been shattered and she needs to make sense of the new world she finds herself in before it kills her.

Deuce is a very flawed character. She reacts to things extremely differently to how we would react to them. This has caused some problems amongst other readers. I understand their outrage but I feel they fail to understand the character. Deuce has no reference whatsoever to the events that she finds herself confronting so she reacts the only way she has been taught how. This comes across as victim blaming to our modern way of thinking, but not to Deuce who has only ever been taught to fight and if you can’t fight, then it is your fault. Yes, I’m being quite vague here, but I want this review to be as spoiler-free as possible as I really want new readers to go into this book with an open mind and not to be influenced by other people’s thoughts and opinions.

Besides this problematic section, which honestly is one very small part of the book, the book as a whole is fascinating. I love reading books that explore what life and society would be like without the rules that we have governing modern day society and without the knowledge we all currently possess about our way of life. When I’m in museums looking at relics from ancient times and how we try to explain them, I wonder what will end up from our civilisation in the museums in the future and how will those civilisations explain them. This book touches on that, our civilisation is as puzzling to them as the Ancient Greek civilisation is to us, possibly even more so.

Readers who have always wondered What if? when it comes our morals and society structure will love this book.