Book Review: Love is the Drug

TITLE: Love is the Drug
AUTHOR: Alaya Dawn Johnson
PUBLISHED: September 30th, 2014
CATEGORY: YA
GENRE: Dystopianish, Drama
PREMISE: A girl tries to uncover what happened to her one night as the world descends into chaos over a deadly plague...
MY REVIEW: You want to talk timely book, this one is it. With all the ebola stuff going on I drew parallels between that and this like whoa. It doesn't just talk about that either though. It goes into privilege, internalized racism, abuse of power, government corruption, and whole other bunch of topics that need to be discussed. If I could review it based on just how much of a conversation/debate starter of a book it is, I would give this book five stars.
Story wise however...this one was a bit slow. The topics were interesting and did help pull the story along. But it did seem to move at a snails pace. Also, this is not an action oriented dystopian. So if you want big world-building, battles, etc. You're better off going elsewhere. This is more of a character study of the main character and how she deals with this world around her and how it effects her. I will say, it's a good character study at least.
Like The Summer Prince, I'm torn about this. It's so interesting and Johnson has such creative ideas and I love the issues it discusses. Also, it takes place in my old stomping grounds in DC, so that was fun for me. But once again the execution....could of used some work. I do think this one was a tad better then The Summer Prince though.
WHO SHOULD READ: fans of the Summer Prince, fans of quiet dystopians
MY RATING: Three and a half out of Five drugs

Many thanks to the publishers for the ARC.