Series: Prisoners of Peace, Book 1
Author: Erin Bow
Release date: September 22, 2015
Published by: Margaret K. McElderry Books/Simon & Schuster
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The world is finally at peace...Why? How? That's easy, each head of each nation has to hand over their first born child to the greater good. They become "Prisoners of Peace". Each child knows that if their nation goes to war, they will be killed as punishment. Child hostages keeping the peace of the world.
My thoughts: I had been waiting for this one since I first heard about it...the cover and the description were so darn great. I was thrilled when I was allowed a chance to read it ahead of time from NetGalley and Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing. I was frustratingly disappointed with this one though. Maybe it was all the build up I'd done in my head and maybe it was the abject brutality of the situation and storyline. Who knows? What I do know is that I was extremely frustrated by it as a whole. I hate writing negative posts about a book, so I have procrastinated and procrastinated on this one since January. Here it goes...
The A.I. (artificial intelligence), Talis, who oversees the hostages is absolutely brutal in its job of keeping the prisoners of peace. It quite literally runs the world for the United Nations. I understood the reasoning for it all, but for some reason couldn't handle it. I also couldn't abide the slowness of it all, along with the sad, tragicness of the loss of hope in everything throughout the book. I'm honestly not sure what about this story is meant to interest me in reading the next book in the series.
What I loved about the story was the world that Bow created. The way that the world was split apart and divided because of wars and alliances was fascinating. For example, the main character of Greta was from what we know as Canada and what they called "The Pan Polar Confederacy". It seemed like a perfectly realistic take on our future that I never even considered.
The only other thing that I thought was nicely done was the addition of a gay relationships between the captives. I always like to see diversity added to any book.
I would recommend this book to anyone who likes a twist on dystopian storytelling, but this one was just not for me unfortunately. C'est la vie.
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