I do love a good dystopian novel. They keep coming and going ‘out of fashion’, and they are definitely a hit or miss when it comes to the plot because of how formulaic they are, but I do love reading them and reading about how bad some authors think our world is going to turn out to be. How cheerful…

The State controls your emotions. What would you pay to feel free?

In a radiant world of endless summer, the Intercept keeps the peace. Violet Crowley, the sixteen-year-old daughter of New Earth’s Founding Father, has spent her life in comfort and safety. Her days are easy thanks to the Intercept, a crime-prevention device that monitors and provokes emotion. But when her long-time crush, Danny Mayhew, gets into a dangerous altercation on Old Earth, Violet launches a secret investigation to find out what he’s hiding. An investigation that will lead her to question everything she’s ever known about Danny, her father, and the power of the Intercept.

Because of my love for dystopians, I was really looking forward to reading The Dark Intercept. It had all of the things that I look for when reading a dystopian. Unfortunately, this book just wasn’t for me and it definitely a book where I preferred the concept to the final product. The concept is brilliant: there’s a machine that manages crime by making you relive your worst memory over and over again, it keeps track of all your emotions… But it just didn’t cut it for me…

“Maybe if you carried bad memories around long enough, they started to change how you walked, how you talked. How you thought.”

– Julia Keller, The Dark Intercept

The main reason why I feel like this book didn’t work out is because of the world-building (or lack of). There just wasn’t any. Why was New Earth built? What happened to Old Earth? Why did they feel like the Intercept had to be used if all of the ‘good’ people had moved to New Earth? How did they choose who to migrate up to New Earth? HOW was New Earth built? These are all questions that I was asking myself as I reading this book, and I was hoping that I would get answers to the questions but I never did. The world building was just so VAGUE. If you’re going to have a ‘new world’, then you need to answer the basic questions. Readers need to know what happened to the old world in order for a new one to be built. They may seem like really picky things, but in order for world building to actually take place, the reader needs to understand what has happened.

Also… the pacing… God, it was dreadful. The whole book (apart from the last 50 or so pages) was sooooooo slllloooooowwwwww. It seemed like a massive chore to get through the book and I had to really motivate myself to read about 10% each night. The last 50 pages were awesome. There were plot twists and PROPER ACTION and just what I wanted, and it’s what the whole book needed to stop it from being a 1 star book. Those last 50 pages is what made me give this book 2 stars. Even though the ending was rushed and was mega fast (compared to the rest of the book), I was glad to finally have some action taking place.

There is a second book coming out in November 2018 called Dark Mind Rising… Will I read it? I don’t know… I’m intrigued as to whether Julia Keller can make this world better and answer the aforementioned questions, but it’s not exactly a book that is anywhere near the top of my TBR.

Disclaimer: this book was sent to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review