The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken
Genre: Dystopia
Section: YA
Reviewer: Juliette
Summary Review:
The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken is the first book in a captivating and exciting trilogy that takes place a dystopian society. The story is centered around a future America, where ninety percent of all children age ten or older die from an unknown cause, while the remaining ten percent continue to survive with newfound abilities. This book follows one girl, Ruby Daly – who may be one of the most special – as she strives to tear down the wall that divides the nation’s suffering people from it’s government’s secrets.
I read this book and it’s other two sequels a couple years ago. In my opinion, it’s easily one of the best trilogies. Alexandra Bracken is a marvelous writer and a genius – the worldbuilding she constructed for this universe is incredibly well developed and fleshed out. Each of the books held your attention and kept you on your toes and each character would slowly begin to grow on you… even the main antagonist.
On the topic of characters – often times we see a trend in teen novels where a lot of the protagonists, deuteragonists, and antagonists may seem to have the same personalities. This trilogy is not the case. At first the characters may seem to hold some stereotypes in regards to story roles, but as you read on you begin to realize they are all very unique and have original attributes.
The book cover did change between before and after the movie adaptation (which I have not seen yet), and I do find myself liking the cover that is inspired by the movie, but the original cover is nice as well. I’m not too concerned by it’s outside appearance. As they always say: never judge a book by it’s cover.
Something important to note about this trilogy is that it’s somewhat long. It’s not nearly as long as series that have been continuing for a while (an example would be the Warrior Cats series, which I read as a kid and as far as I’m aware, is still being written.) But each book has relatively small text and is 500+ pages in length. Personally I found the book to be riveting enough to read all at once, but some others may struggle, so spacing it out would be a good idea.
Overall, I’d say that if you like stories that have revolution or dystopian themes, this is a good pick for you. I’m sure any Hunger Games or Maze Runner fans would find this trilogy fascinating.
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