Next on this week's Friday Reads is an ARC review that is part of my NetGalley November challenge! I still have a lot of catching up to do, but at least I managed to read and review Pawn before its release date of November 26th!
Pawn by Aimee Carter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I'm quite a fan of dystopian books so when I found out about Pawn I requested it immediately on NetGalley, so thank you Harlequin Teen for approving my request!
Since I've read quite a few dystopian books already I usually trust my judgement on the blurb of the book but with Pawn I'm glad I decided to not trust my first instinct completely, cause I wasn't 100% sold on it, but the title reference to chess made me want to read the book, and I'm quite glad I did!
This world we found ourselves in boasts of being based on merit, you take a test at 17 and it will determine your rank number and from then on your jobs and the kind of life you'll have. From I to VI, because the VII's are by birth only and they're the Harts, the ruling family. Kitty can't complete her exam and is awarded only a III, which means she'll spend her life cleaning sewers. She rebels against her fate and tries another not-much-better option and due to some random chance she's given the chance to became a VII, being Masked and taking the place of Lila Hart, the niece of the current Prime Minister.
One of the best things about Pawn and that I must really praise the author for is how she doesn't hold back any punches. She does show us all the ugly stuff and she's not afraid to face the reader with a very harsh reality out there. In this dystopian the Earth is not trying to kill us with natural catastrophes, here it's all about power, political and economical, control and the ugliness that human nature is capable of.
Kitty is thrown into a mess of family conflicts and political intrigue without much of a warning and she has to learn how to be someone else and how to negotiate who she's supposed to be without losing sense of who she really is. She has to face the ugly and shocking truth behind the propaganda of the Harts and she keeps on being threatened by almost everyone around her to take their side. She's a strong character and she fights to try and make her own choices, to keep those she love safe and to try and stay alive. And she finds that she has the strengh and the wit to do just that by the end of the book.
One thing that I kept on wondering about during the first part of the book was how much all the mentions of the Hart family made me think of Alice in Wonderland and the Queen of Hearts and the rest of court... I don't know if I'm the only one that thinks so, or if it was even part of what the author intended...
Pawn is full of twists and turns and most of them really took me by surprise! One of the biggest shocks, so big I had to close the book for a moment was the revelation of that Elsewhere really was. Shocking, harsh but not something that humans haven't done before, unfortunately.
There's some romance in the book, but Benjy and Kitty had been together before the story starts in Pawn, so we get mostly longing for being together and a motivation for keeping each other safe. There might seem to be some hints to a possible love triangle with Knox, Lila's fiance, at some point but I'd say it was averted in this book and hopefully for the rest of the series!
Very happy I got to read this one in advance and very intrigued where the series will take us next. A very original take on the dystopian genre that deserves 4 stars.
View all my reviews
Pawn by Aimee CarterMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I'm quite a fan of dystopian books so when I found out about Pawn I requested it immediately on NetGalley, so thank you Harlequin Teen for approving my request!
Since I've read quite a few dystopian books already I usually trust my judgement on the blurb of the book but with Pawn I'm glad I decided to not trust my first instinct completely, cause I wasn't 100% sold on it, but the title reference to chess made me want to read the book, and I'm quite glad I did!
This world we found ourselves in boasts of being based on merit, you take a test at 17 and it will determine your rank number and from then on your jobs and the kind of life you'll have. From I to VI, because the VII's are by birth only and they're the Harts, the ruling family. Kitty can't complete her exam and is awarded only a III, which means she'll spend her life cleaning sewers. She rebels against her fate and tries another not-much-better option and due to some random chance she's given the chance to became a VII, being Masked and taking the place of Lila Hart, the niece of the current Prime Minister.
One of the best things about Pawn and that I must really praise the author for is how she doesn't hold back any punches. She does show us all the ugly stuff and she's not afraid to face the reader with a very harsh reality out there. In this dystopian the Earth is not trying to kill us with natural catastrophes, here it's all about power, political and economical, control and the ugliness that human nature is capable of.
Kitty is thrown into a mess of family conflicts and political intrigue without much of a warning and she has to learn how to be someone else and how to negotiate who she's supposed to be without losing sense of who she really is. She has to face the ugly and shocking truth behind the propaganda of the Harts and she keeps on being threatened by almost everyone around her to take their side. She's a strong character and she fights to try and make her own choices, to keep those she love safe and to try and stay alive. And she finds that she has the strengh and the wit to do just that by the end of the book.
One thing that I kept on wondering about during the first part of the book was how much all the mentions of the Hart family made me think of Alice in Wonderland and the Queen of Hearts and the rest of court... I don't know if I'm the only one that thinks so, or if it was even part of what the author intended...
Pawn is full of twists and turns and most of them really took me by surprise! One of the biggest shocks, so big I had to close the book for a moment was the revelation of that Elsewhere really was. Shocking, harsh but not something that humans haven't done before, unfortunately.
There's some romance in the book, but Benjy and Kitty had been together before the story starts in Pawn, so we get mostly longing for being together and a motivation for keeping each other safe. There might seem to be some hints to a possible love triangle with Knox, Lila's fiance, at some point but I'd say it was averted in this book and hopefully for the rest of the series!
Very happy I got to read this one in advance and very intrigued where the series will take us next. A very original take on the dystopian genre that deserves 4 stars.
View all my reviews
