Alive by Scott Sigler

If your thinking about reading this, it is probably because you read Hunger Games, the Divergent Series, The 5th Wave and or Maze Runner and enjoyed them and thought it would be fun to go back for more. Most of these books are mentioned in the blurb which actually works as a double-edged sword as the very thing that draws you to this series may be its Achilles heal. Don’t get me wrong there are some wonderfully original ideas in this but a lot of it feels so heavily borrowed from things I’ve already read that I found myself craving more personal touches from the Author rather than being fully committed to the story. Scott allows his protagonists a higher level of intelligence and reasoning than most, which I was very appreciate of, but in an over crowded market place you sort of need to be selling elephants to stand out.

As the blurb mentions a young adult girl wakes up in a confined space with other young adults and she must find way for them to escape when they look to her for leadership. The next two hundred pages contain some interesting character developments, some great conflict between different factions and personalities and a few horrifying reveals but nothing truly out of the box. The lack of light and space in the area inhabited by the kids is a character all of it’s own and keeps things tight, heavy and grindingly bleak but also emulates that feeling that all this is just a set up for something bigger, which again is a sensation I got with a lot of the current YA Dystopian fiction on the market. By the time the fairly well worn outline is established we have hit the last third of the book and this is where I think Scott found his voice and let the beast out. There were some great twists in the narrative and some bold new directions that no longer had me thinking of other books I’d read and I was finally dragged into world just in time to be spat out at the finish.

Overall it felt like a popcorn book. I liked the taste even though it was not particularly nourishing. A good choice for a lazy morning or afternoon when you have a few things to do and want something easy to jump into.

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review