CBR17 Bingo: Purple – Behold, the cover.
In a world consumed by debt, Inesa’s mother’s compulsive spending causes her to be selected for the Gauntlet, in which she will almost certainly be killed on live TV to wipe out what her family owes. But when Inesa and the girl assigned to kill her, Melinoe, are forced to rely on each other in the wilderness, the line between predator and prey gets blurred.
This is a YA dystopian romance which is in many ways a homage and a response to the YA dystopian romances which were a major trend about a decade ago. As I devoured many of those books back then (and The Hunger Games still remains a favorite), I was interested to see Reid’s take on it. Also, that cover is gorgeous!
The dystopian part delivers. The world-building is excellent, in many ways accelerating many of the issues in the modern world – the widening economic disparity, climate change, the influence on billion-dollar businesses on government and so on – into a potential future that makes perfect, depressing sense. The writing is really lovely too – I found myself slowly down again and again to really appreciate the beauty of this description, of that turn of phrase. I’ll definitely be checking out Reid’s other books on the strength of that alone!
However, the romance is rather lacking. Since Melinoe and Inesa don’t meet until about halfway through an average-length book, their relationship progresses at an impossibly fast clip, and I did not really buy into it. I was more interested in the sibling relationship between Inesa and Luka, but he vanishes off page for a large chunk of the book. And I did like the melancholy ending and understand why it happened, I can see why people would dislike it in a book that is billed as a romance.