(NOTE FROM ENNA: River is going to be helping me a lot with reviews for a little while. I'm doing my senior project this semester, and it's kind of consuming my life. I'm in class/work/rehearsal from about 9-9 every day until March. Hopefully I can get my act together on the weekends and schedule some stuff. Until then, enjoy another River Review!)

Release Date: August 28th, 2012
Genre: Dystopia, Sci-fi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 320
Rating:
Amazon Link*: Click here
Goodreads Page: Click here
Summary:

Sixteen-year-old Noa has been a victim of the system ever since her parents died. Now living off the grid and trusting no one, she uses her computer-hacking skills to stay safely anonymous and alone. But when she wakes up on a table in an empty warehouse with an IV in her arm and no memory of how she got there, Noa starts to wish she had someone on her side.

Enter Peter Gregory. A rich kid and the leader of a hacker alliance, Peter needs people with Noa's talents on his team. Especially after a shady corporation called AMRF threatens his life in no uncertain terms.

But what Noa and Peter don't realize is that Noa holds the key to a terrible secret, and there are those who'd stop at nothing to silence her for good.

Review: I wasn't blown away by this book, but it was still fairly good. I had really high expectations for it at the beginning when the first chapter was so action-packed, but they slowly slipped away as the protagonist seemed to spend a fair amount of time perched on her Apple laptop (This is a complete exaggeration, but I feel like the words "macbook" or "apple" were used more than the main character's name, which was annoying- there were just way too many references to her computer!) in coffee shops, wondering where she was going to sleep for the night. In all fairness, considering Noa's circumstances and her history as a computer hacker, it made sense that she would be rotating coffee shops and that she would be fairly obsessed with her laptop, but it still made for boring reading for me at times. 

However, it wasn't all boring, and in retrospect, most of the book was lively and fast-paced. When I first discovered what had happened to Noa, I admit I was fairly unimpressed, but the author managed to turn it into something interesting and curious, dropping mysterious hints about future sequels as I read. Noa herself was a likable protagonist, even if she wasn't the usual kick-butt, hard-edged heroine that I like. She was still smart and the other main characters were equally well-written.

Michelle Gagnon vanquished most of my doubts about the novel in the last few pages when she completely turned the tables on me, which frustrated the snot out of me. Things were finally looking for the main characters and for humanity as a whole, and she viciously squelched my rising hopes with a crusher of an ending that, of course, made me feel obligated to read the next book to find out what happens. Overall, I guess my final description for the book is that it was pretty good, and I ended up liking it for a book that really didn't seem like my type from the get-go.


*I am an amazon affiliate. If you purchase this book using my link, I will get a tiny fraction of the purchase, which goes toward contests.