Book Review: Awaken

TITLE: Awaken
I believe this is the start of a new series?
AUTHOR: Karen Kacvinsky
PUBLISHED: 2011
CATEGORY: Young adult
GENRE: dystopian, drama, romance
PREMISE: A girl in the future meets a boy who tries to get her to see past her society's reliability on technology.
MY REVIEW: Let's face it, thanks to the success of Hunger Games, dystopians have sort of become the new vampires. They're everywhere (and thankfully most of them are better then the vampire genre). So it's easy to see why people probably overlooked Awaken this year. It's a shame too, because I think this is one of the better ones. Yes, the romance is rather obvious and probably not as interesting to people as say Matched but the good writing and character developement going on in this more then make up for the lackluster romance which while the poorest part of the book is still decent at least. I mean it's rather refreshing having a guy encourage a girl to be more independant and not rely on him.
It does sort of hit you over the head with the don't rely too much on technology message but this dystopian had what the more popular Matched and Wither did not for me: a actual plausible world. I can picture this world happening. Also one of my issues with Matched/Wither was that I couldn't see how people let things come to the way they were (especially in Matched when it was clear people weren't happy with the society but they didn't DO anything either) in this one the author gave plausible reasons for how this world came to be and why people let it continue. That's the trick with dystopians for me: making people believe that this world could happen. Some dystopians succeed very well in this while others...not so much.
This is like Delirium where it's quieter then most dystopians and I honestly don't mind that. I don't know if the author is making this a series/trilogy but considering the way it left off I'm pretty sure she is. Or I hope she is because no way can you leave it like that. Either way, I'm definitely keeping an eye out for this author's stuff in the future.
WHO SHOULD READ: dystopian fans, fans of Delirium, fans of Matched,
MY RATING: Four and a half out of Five computer consoles