I enjoyed this book.  I had started it a few years ago, but I don’t think I finished it.  I’m glad I went back.  The tale is a refreshing take on the overused “young hero leads rebellion to destroy dystopian society” story.  It had the same basic idea as The Hunger Games and Divergent and the Inheritance Cycle and… you get the point.  However, this story had a different feel.  Aside from the general idea, the overall story arc was different.  I don’t want to spoil anything, but it wasn’t the usual “nobody teen hero is discovered and put at the head of an established army to fight an age-long war” thing.  A nice change.

It did suffer a little bit from what I have noticed in a lot of stories I’ve experienced lately, that the story is too easy.  A couple of the major events didn’t really seem to put the heroes in serious danger.  There wasn’t really the uncertainty that the hero would survive.  Aside from him telling us that they were struggling, I didn’t really get the sense that they were having much difficulty.  That brings me to another point.  Overall, the writing was great, but I felt like he could have done a better job “showing, not telling” in places.  But he did do a fantastic job in many places of painting a very vivid image in my mind.  There were other minor issues with the writing sometimes (like using the
POV character’s name more than he should have in a short stretch) but it mostly fell away as I got more invested in the story.  His dialogue did cause some issues for me at times through the whole thing.  I got lost in some exchanges trying to figure out who was saying and doing what.

How he structured the story felt a bit off sometimes as well.  It felt very fast sometimes and could have benefited from slowing down between events.  His choice of point of view changes felt awkward as well.  It was extremely irregular with most of the book from one character’s POV, but with half a chapter here and there from another character’s and one page from another’s and so on.  This might not bother some people, but it felt strange to me. 

Now I have just pointed out all the problems I had with the book, and most of these complaints really had very little effect on my enjoyment of the book.  I still definitely recommend the story to young adults interested in fantasy and sci-fi.  The book creates a nice mix of elements from both.  He created a fascinating world and interesting characters.  I am now about to start the second one and am looking forward to it, so I will waste no more time writing this.