I went into this one with pretty high expectations, based on the glowing reviews and the fact that I am game for a dystopian take on the gladiator trope. Alas, it lost steam pretty quickly for me. There were too many characters that the author didn’t seem to fully invest in, it read like disjointed vignettes, I wanted to know more about the descent into this dystopian system from our current day, and the action sequence of the ending was muddled. The exposure of our terrible criminal justice system, with many current factual footnotes, was the standout of this novel and I absolutely appreciate the aim in exposing it with a captivating fiction. It just didn’t captivate me.