This book follows a girl named Seren, who has lived in space all her life, but she doesn’t understand the importance of her role. Everyone on this spaceship is important because everyone is the key to the survival of the human species. This means that everyone’s life is controlled and there are rules, such as you will all have a breeding partner. However Seren doesn’t see why this is important and she starts to see the flaws in the system. She also starts to fall for a guy called Dom, although sadly he isn’t her planned breeding partner.
I went into this book knowing it was a YA sci-fi romance book, however I don’t think this would be the way I would describe it in hindsight. Even though the romance plays a vital role in this book, I don’t think the romance was enough for me. For example, I feel that this book was just about the instant love between the two characters. This meant that the romance wasn’t believable enough and I just couldn’t relate to the characters.
However whilst reading the book I did get the 100 book vibe and this made the book more enjoyable because I could imagine what the setting of the book looked like. However I don’t think the mental health part of this book fitted the story. At times I didn’t know, as a reader, that Seren was suffering from a mental illness. If this was made clearer and if it played a more prominent role in the book, I think I would have enjoyed the book more.
On the other hand, I did enjoy the plot of the book and the forbidden romance. This is because the forbidden romance added suspense and I wanted to know what was going to happen to the characters. There was also a prominent theme of family and this was something I wanted to know more about. In the book there were references to Seren’s mother, but we actually don’t know what happened to her and I would want to know more about her mother to fill in the gaps.
Overall if you are new to YA you should read this book, because this book covers the main topics of YA and it does give the YA vibe. However, as an “experienced” YA book lover, I don’t think this book would be for people who have already read a lot of YA.
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