The author kindly sent me this book last year, and I was super excited to read it, but with one thing and another... it took me until now to get to it.

I was looking forward to reading it, because Floor 21 sounded like a really nice twist to the dystopia genre, which I got hooked on when I read the Hunger Games series.

Unfortunately, the main character, Jackie, isn't very likable, and worse yet, I think the author fell far short in trying to write a young female character, and there were a lot of character traits that were exact opposites, which drove me crazy (for example: she keeps whining at one point pretty early on in the book, about how she wants to date, but yet when a perfectly nice boy asks her out, she's extremely rude to him. It's later explained that the boy teased her ONCE a million years ago, and that's why Jackie is so rude to him.). Jackie's supposedly SO smart, yet she talks like she's 10, has the maturity of a 12 year old, and whines like a 2 year old.

It also drove me crazy that Jackie repeatedly mentions playing baseball with her father in her younger days, but it's never explained exactly how one is playing baseball in a building with limited resources and space. On the roof where the garden is? Yeah, I'm sure a community starving to death is going to leave space for a small baseball field instead of growing more food.

And then halfway through the book, instead of hearing from Jackie, the character voice switches, which did not work for me at all (even though I was not a Jackie fan). I think if the author had wanted to switch voices, he should have switched voices way earlier in the book, perhaps alternating voices like most authors do when dealing with this?

I did really like the fact that Floor 21 is a very unique dystopian world, I liked all the mystery surrounding the storyline, and there are some very interesting scenes that did keep me reading, the book was well edited and written, but overall, the book just did not work for me.