I read this as it was the book chosen for my new book club and if not for that simple fact, I never would have finished it. This book was bizarre in one of the worst ways I've ever had the opportunity to witness. I'd like to just say it was bad, that it was a book I just personally didn't mesh with, so I'll move on from it, but the levels in which this book managed to shock and offend me by being published in the first place, needs to be addressed. 

 

First off, it needed development. The jumps between voice and time and dialogue were just so non sensical. There was so much promise at the start and even at points in the middle, but it just never lifts off in the way the blurb implies/promised. 

 

What I was able to get from this is that the world is currently in a post war time environment where, what appears to be Russia has taken over the world and is now known as the Allied Force. This has happened because of a meteor crashing I think and some other stuff that’s not quite clear. We’re not sure who the Allied Force are allied with or against, since it seems that they literally have control over the entire world already so who exactly are they fighting. The UK and the US are known as the Transatlantic Empire but don’t really do much in the novel or the world it seems, so not sure why this distinction is made. Anyway, the Russian Nazis rule the world and in a weird twist of things, they were actually the most interesting thing throughout as the writer seemed to have really fleshed out who they were and their motivations for world domination. How they condition their men into soldiers, how they view the world, how the main Hitler guy High General Stormbane rules was so sinister. I enjoyed reading the dynamic of he and his family, especially his sons Maximus and Vorian, but we’ll get to that. 

 

The book take place during an event called the Great Hunt in which the oppressed are forced to take part in a Hunger Games type event which is televised and everyone watching thinks isn’t real. Our main character, Coa is stressed because if she doesn’t win the game – it’s not clear how – her whole family will be killed. The massive problem with this is that Coa’s family is adopted and therefore she has no blood relation to them. This means, that despite DNA tracking being the reason as to how the AF could find her family, this wouldn’t in fact work since they have no DNA in common. In addition to this, at the very start of the book, Coa actively says she is willing to die when one of the soldiers corners her. If that’s the case, then what are the stakes and why are you fighting so hard in the Great Hunt to save your family? Its contradictory and downright stupid. At one-point shes even asked by some bad guys whether she has family and she simply says no and they just… believe her. So how are they ever in danger? 

Coa is in this position ultimately because she is in a labour camp but its never made entirely clear how she got there. She seems to have been some kind of feral child in a human zoo with no verbal communication but by the time we meet her, she’s perfectly understandable. She is also meant to have some kind of lightning magic that after being mentioned, doesn’t play any major part in the story. She mentions there being some kind of price to pay for using but this but its never paid as she uses them at two convenient points in the book and nothing happens to her because of it so why not use it to kill everyone around you? 

 

Speaking of killing people, this brings us onto the second main character/POV from a girl called Ife. Ife is ethnic, the only ethnic in the whole book it seems and she is married to the son of the Allied Forces, a perfect soldier named Maximus. Although magic is supposed to originate in Africa, the only African descendent in the book has no magic of her own. However, I will say that Maximums and Ife were the most entertaining for me as I was the most invested in their pseudo romance and the complexity of their relationship. On the one hand, she spends her time saying she is going to kill Maximus and bring down the Allied Force but its not shown how and at no point does she in fact, try to kill him. She spends most of her time saying she doesn’t care for him while showing that she does in fact care for him and sleeping with him. I guess it’s meant to show how she has to do what she must to survive but since she seems to have willing run to safety with this man and his family – which makes no sense since they’re her mortal enemies and of course is never explained – it reads hollow. She says she ran to him when she was thirteen and married him when she was fifteen. How? Why? To broker peace amongst AF and foreigners. That doesn’t seem to be happening when foreigners are still treated like shit, Ife included. 

 

The book was given an extra star however, simply for the ending in which Ife and Maximus play the biggest part. I can honestly say I didn’t see it coming in such a way. It was truly shocking and exciting and had it been more like that throughout the book/from the start, then it might have been great. The points that led up to it were so well woven into what was happening that while it came out of nowhere, you did realise that the clues had been laid beforehand. Where it was let down is that because there was so much other bullshit in and around it, you didn’t realise that these things were in fact important, and not just Ife being repetitive. 

 

Lastly, I will point out that I understood this was a book with black and brown characters but everyone was blonde haired and blue eyed. Maybe there were some lines crossed here but I was so confused by this and even more so by the image of the author themselves who I’m not sure if they’re even a real person. Im not one to scream AI from the rooftops but coupled with how this book ever got printed, it just doesn’t feel remotely like this is a real person or serious book.