I received this book from Titan Books in exchange for an honest review.

Lucie Sterling lives in a city that has banned all forms of invasive digital technology - that means no phones, no gaming, and no online databases that could result in a privacy breach. However, when children start going missing and bodies show up, Lucie is forced to enter Green Valley - a mysterious bunker shut off from the rest of the city in which the inhabitants live exclusively through VR simulation. As Lucie struggles to save her niece, who has grown up in Green Valley, she begins to see what the VR lifestyle may really be hiding.

This was just okay. I liked the concept behind the story, and how the author played with two sides of a world that detested invasive tech and another side that embraced it. As readers, we got to see the upside and downside of both worlds; and there was definitely an interesting and important message in the book about not losing yourself to an online world and allowing children to be children and not staring at a screen/attached to a screen all day.

I though something more was going to come out of the Sentinel. It was creepy and mysterious as a defensive body can go, and I thought there would be some revelations at the end of the book about Barbra and her ilk and what they were really doing but there was nothing. I also felt like the end of the book was the equivalent of letting a balloon go. It was so boring and anti-climatic.

The VR set up in this book is very cool but I definitely feel like there were parts of it that were really lacking; and I also found it hard to believe a whole subset of a population could decide to live that way and get so much wrong at the same time? I've seen VR done better (Ready Player One for example) and weirdly, I actually think the story told in this novel would do better as a condensed episode on Black Mirror.