Book 1 in the Starters series
AUTHOR: Lissa Price
PUBLISHED: 2012
CATEGORY: YA
GENRE: Dystopian, adventure
PREMISE: In a world where teens rent out bodies to older rich people in order to get money, Callie is forced to rent her body and becomes drawn into a plot for assassination.
MY REVIEW: Let's face it: dystopians are EVERYWHERE now thanks largely to the success of The Hunger Games. With this being the trend now it's difficult to make a dystopian stand out. While I don't think Starters is a completely brilliant novel (I just have a very difficult time buying that people would treat the young this extremely ever considering all the ageism in this world) I do think this is a highly entertaining and interesting story and like how despite the somewhat not believeable premise the author did come up with several plausible ideas for how this could happen and for how the world operates. So I forgive the fact that I don't for a minute think it could ever happen. This is a thing with me in dystopians: if you can't make me believe this could actually happen at least give legit explanations for how the world came to be. That's what I love about the Hunger Games and the world of Delirium: the worlds will probably never actually happen but the author does manage to set up a plausible thought out scenario that makes me want to stay in said world anyway.
Plus, Callie is very refreshing. She's actually a proactive heroine for a change. True, I could have done without the insta romance with Blake and some of her drama about that but for the most part I liked Callie and root for her. I also like the topics this book tackles such as ageism, priviledge, how ignorance among people can be a bad thing, etc. etc. Plus this world was just interesting and instead of info dump after info dump the author takes time to set up the world.
Honestly I really liked this. It may be one of my favorite dystopians/new series so far this year and certainly is one of the stronger YA debuts of 2012. I'm definitely looking forward to Enders and anything else Lissa Price will write in the future. Much thanks to Delacorte Press for the eARC of this book.
WHO SHOULD READ: Hunger Games fans, Delirium fans, dystopian fans
MY RATING: Four out of Five renters
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