After the Omega, an event in which a powerful EMP rocks the USA, the country becomes known as the True Republic of America. People are herded into settlement camps and life in the country resumes. The story is told from two perspectives: Hope and Book. Book is a 16 year old orphan who is being raised in Camp Liberty. He believes he and the other boys there are being trained to become apart of the military until they find a boy in the desert who tells them they are being raised as hunting prey for the soliders and they were selected at birth due to their race, disabilities, abnormalities, or if their parents were political dissents.

Hope and her twin sister Faith have been living in the woods with their father since the day the soliders came and killed their mother. When their father died he leaves Hope with this parting word "seperate" meaning he wanted her and Faith to seperate from each other. The problem is that Faith is too weak to fend for herself and Hope can't part with her twin. They stay together and become the new tenets of Barracks B at Camp Freedom, a camp that runs experimental treatments on twin girls.

As the reader you follow both characters through their fight for survival and their flight to freedom in this excellent diverse series. This series, though it had some wording and grammatical issues, was an amazing read. The pacing never feels forced for the most part and the characters naturally exist in this world. The world also seems to be within the realm of possibilities and brought forth great diversity issues such as racism and civil rights.

The only complaints I have are that as the book goes along you see Hope becoming less badass and she spends more time on her crush between Cat and Book. I'm beginning to think this is a trap some writers fall into: present a badass character and then when they fall in love have them become a pile of mush. While that is true for some people, I know others that are like me and would have been "screw my feelings I gotta survive". Another thing that bugged me was that Book's character development occurred within the last 50 pages of the book and not a lot of attention is placed on the other 26 members of the group. I just put the book down and can't remember half of the children's names. I think the story would have benefitted from having more character interaction between the mains and the minors. I also think that the last 100 pages of the book needed to be slowed down significantly. The book had very good pacing until that point. The author could have easily extended that 100 pages into 200 more with the amount of activity that was going on.

All in all it was an amazing story and one with an ending that will come out of left field entirely. I also believe I read this book the perfect pivotal moment in history, but I'm certainly not hoping for an outcome like what occurs in The Prey.

I hope book 2 is just as good.