Dystopian Archives - Proud Book Reviews

October 10, 2022July 30, 2022

A Time of Prophecy – Rebecca Crunden

This book contains:

Civil war
War crimes
Human experimentation (without consent)
Genocide
Murder.

Following Kitty, Nate and Thom throughout the book we’re constantly changing perspectives depending on what’s happening. All three are fighting fit and ready to accomplish anything they set their minds to.

Kickstarting the overall storyline for this book is Kitty being brought back into the Kingdom to stand trial for releasing a strain of the Plague that had no antidote and resulted in millions of people dying. When Kitty goes with them to be interviewed on her part in this happening, she learns the current state of the Kingdom and realises that she can’t continue with her life in the Outlands knowing what’s happening within the Kingdom.

I’m going to come right out with my main gripe about this book.

It needed to be longer.

There, I said it!

Rebecca has created such an intricate, complex world that the events that play out in this book can’t be covered in the same depth as the previous books in the same number of pages. It just doesn’t work.

Kinda like the final Harry Potter book was split into two movies coz they knew they couldn’t do it justice in one movie. This book needed more time than a single book can provide AND give us the same level of detail and quality I’ve come to expect from this series.

So in a way this gripe is also a compliment (because Rebecca has created such a rich world), so you should definitely take that as the positive it is!

I just really wish Rebecca had decided to write a longer final book since we couldn’t make it 6 books given the name of the series (The Outlands Pentalogy). While it’d take longer to read, I definitely think it would’ve been worth it!

October 3, 2022July 30, 2022

A Dance of Lies – Rebecca Crunden

This book contains:

Revenge (including psychological torture, physical torture, bloodshed and murder/killing).

Unlike the first three books, this book mostly follows Kitty, but also has moments of following Thom or Nate allowing us to gain perspectives from all three of them during their time in the Outlands.

Kitty, Nate and Thom are building a life for themselves in the Outlands despite Quen constantly attacking them and the others from the Kingdom wanting to return to fight for freedom. As tensions reach breaking point, Riddle and Kitty develop a special bond that has Nate questioning the future of his relationship with Kitty.

Coming straight off the back of A Promise of Return, the pace and drama of this just wasn’t the same. It’s not that it was bad, it’s just that I wasn’t constantly wishing I could stop what I was doing and keep reading.

There were certainly stretches of the book where I felt that way. But to set up for those parts, others needed to be a bit slower, more relationship focused and less adrenaline pumping.

The main reason for scoring this one a little lower was that we’ve gone from following just one character then whole way through, to occasionally swapping perspectives. Being book 4 and the first time this is happening it thew me off a little which also threw me out of my reading zone.

If you go in expecting to suddenly change perspectives a couple times you may not experience that “thrown” feeling quite so much. But I wasn’t expecting it, so it did throw me.

Otherwise, the culmination of all the build up at the end surprised me, drew me in but also left me wondering what was left to cover in the fifth and last book of the series.

September 26, 2022July 30, 2022

A Promise of Return – Rebecca Crunden

This book contains:

Torture
Slavery
Gladiator style ring fighting to the death
Sex for information and social advantage
Cannibalism
Mental suffering.

Thom is the brother to Nate (A History of Madness follows Nate, and he’s heavily included in A Touch of Death) and Complement to Kitty (A Touch of Death follows Kitty, and she’s heavily included in A History of Madness) and a master of words. He’s a politician through and through and has been since he was a child.

Finding ways to advantage his loved ones is something he’s done his entire life, it’s natural for him. Yet there is so much more to him than just making sure his brother and Complement are safe and happy.

Picking up from near the end of A Touch of Death, we follow Thom as he’s caught breaking into restricted government buildings and brought to the King for judgement. From there we follow him throughout his torturous days until he’s reunited with Nate and Kitty (the ending of A History of Madness) and then continues from there as he tries to build a life in the Outlands.

Hearing Thom’s story, how he became who he was, made so many small pieces of his personality that showed in the first two books make sense. He’s a fixer. He needs to make sure those around him are happy, healthy, and safe and if doing so also sets him up for advantage later, all the better.

While I wasn’t expecting the relationship he developed with Charles (purely because this part of his personality wasn’t really mentioned in the first two books), after hearing about his earlier life it made sense. When you’ve only known someone to be straight, it is a shock to discover that’s not the case. For me personally, so long as it makes sense for the characters to suddenly change (and in this case it wasn’t sudden, we just didn’t have the full backstory before this book), I don’t care.

In this instance, Thom’s sexuality played a major part of the storyline and therefore made sense. So I have zero issues, instead, I found it added value, complexity and depth to several characters that enhanced the story overall.

Compared to the previous two books, this is definitely bloodier and gorier. But I found I quite liked it!

Sometimes you need the blood and guts to break up other genres and every part of that added thrill and adrenaline to my reading experience and set me up to want to dive immediately into the next book.

November 22, 2021November 21, 2021

A History of Madness – Rebecca Crunden

This book contains:

References to rape
Murder
Abortion
Kidnapping
Same sex sexual preferences
Religious cult including references to human sacrifice
References to scientific experimentation on humans.

We’re following the same characters as in A Touch of Death, but this time, Nate is the main character we’re following. And we’re introduced to a new character I’m hoping will feature more in the coming books.

While we left with Kitty knowing where Nate was, we pick up with Nate entering Redwater prison. Nate’s being pulled left and right, being tested on and finds himself in a workcamp rather than being executed. Nate being Nate finds a way to escape and works on reaching the same goal he had in A Touch of Death, to reach the Outlands.

I can’t believe I took so long to get back to this book!

I got to the end, and while I was able to guess the final surprise, I was still left wondering where the whole story would go in the coming books. Knowing that the series is finished, and I can smash through them when I want, I’m excited!

And yes, I have actually gone and bought the whole series because I can just tell that I’m going to love them and want them on my bookshelves.

There is such a great mix of action, romance, grief, societal change, religious conflict and cultural differences. Rebecca packs so much into a single story, and yet, it doesn’t feel preachy, it doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard, and it definitely doesn’t feel unbalanced or rushed.

It’s got such a great pace and winds the elements together in such a way that they feel natural and like they’re all building to a greater part of the story. To add value to the overall storyline across the whole series. While they don’t always make sense in the current book, I can feel that they’ll make sense in the long run and I’m so excited!

April 10, 2019January 11, 2021

Burden of Truth – Kristin Ward

Welcome back everyone, you’ll notice me jumping between two series for the next couple of weeks, so I hope you don’t mind. After finishing After the Green Withered, I lasted all of 22 hours before asking for the second book so I could start reading it immediately.

Writing Style

After the unique style of After the Green Withered, I was expecting this one to follow the same style. What I found was that although there were elements that were still there, there were also elements that felt very similar to some other dystopian YA novels.

I still want to know what happens next. But I’m almost afraid to know because it’s so close to tipping into the realm of what’s been done multiple times already. Which is one of the issues I have with the YA genre that Kristin has done SO WELL to keep clear of so far.

I know it’s really hard (if not impossible) to come up with 100% unique stories these days. But this one is getting perilously close to the point of no return for me. And I REALLY hope it doesn’t go that way because I really did love the first one.

Please Kristin, do not go the way of Hunger Games, Divergent and The 100! Your story is so different, and it doesn’t deserve to be tarnished with those generic story lines!

Note: I still enjoyed those stories, I just don’t want to read another one that follows almost the same skeleton for the story and character development as so many other YA books.

Initial Thoughts

I really felt like there was hope that Enora could be true to herself and what she believes in. Maybe she could be the driving force for change in a positive way.

At the same time, was I reading the vibes between Enora and Springer properly? Were they being set up to fall for each other and be a romance within the story? I kinda hope not.

I’m really loving the focus on the survival and the truth. So, I hope it isn’t ruined by an attempt to put some romance in there just coz it feels like there probably should be some romance to balance the sorrow that otherwise overpowers the story.

Final Thoughts

By the end of the book I was wishing Kristin took a different route for the story. Almost all my fears for the story and character development were realised.

Enora and Springer end up kinda being a couple, the rebel faction is possibly just as evil as the DMC so Enora and Springer decide to make their own way. Only to end up pretty much dead (but still alive) right at the end of the book and Enora doing something quite possibly, ridiculously stupid in an attempt to save their lives.

Sound familiar to anyone?

If you’re not sure, think about Katness almost shooting the rebel leader and at the last second shooting the evil president in Hunger Games. Not to mention her weird romance with Peeta. In Divergent, don’t Beatrice and Four leave the rebels and their home in the hope of finding something better when it turns out the rebels are as bad as their ruling council?

I don’t like drawing parallels between different stories. But every step this book took towards this feel I cringed. Kristin, it feels like you have so much creativity and some great ideas that are different to anything that’s happened before. Please bring this out in full force for Ander’s story!

I still enjoyed the story as a whole, there were just moments when I felt like those parallels were glaringly obvious. While at other’s it was still it’s own story with no other similarities that made me mourn right alongside Enora and Springer.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this review, next week I will be reviewing Zoe Ashwood’s second Shifter novel Truth or Bear.

April 8, 2019January 11, 2021

After the Green Withered – Kristin Ward

Welcome back everyone, last week we were enjoying the English countryside. And this week we are exploring a dystopian America sometime in the future as part of a MASSIVE book tour.

Writing Style

My favourite thing about the writing style and the story, is that it doesn’t remind me of Divergent too much. That is, past the whole the world has almost died/humanity has almost died and there’s only a few survivors and the main character is a teen.

Like, it’s a YA/NA novel so the whole teen as a main character thing makes sense. But I’m glad it’s not written in as soppy/teen-love kind of way as Divergent.

Anyway, Kristin really gets her hooks into your skin to make sure you want to keep reading.

Initial Thoughts

I honestly thought once I started reading this “OMG, not another Divergent. I read that one, and even though it’s OK I just REALLY don’t want to read another book about how some teens life is so difficult coz the world has practically ended.”

I’m not saying that it wasn’t a bad book. I did enjoy it. But that style of writing is one I enjoy reading while getting drunk on a tropical beach while on holiday. Coz it doesn’t take concentration, I can power through it and enjoy it and move on with enjoying the beach.

But I’m not on holiday. I’m suffering through a heat wave. And I want something more adult to take me away from the pains of treating an assignment like a child (because that’s honestly what they want me to do with it).

I stuck at it. Not only coz I had a feeling I should, but also coz I committed to reading this one as part of a Book Tour.

Final Thoughts

And I’m glad I did because, I found that once I got through the drag of the first 25-30% of the book (you know, that boring setting the scene kinda thing) I just flew through the book. I double checked the length, and it’s not a short book. So, I must’ve been really engrossed in it to read it in a matter of days purely in the 10-20 mins before falling asleep. And the 40-50-minute bus trip to and from work each day.

I will honestly tell you that when I finished this book, I felt a sense of relief, and regret, and a sinking “o no” feeling all at the same time. Relief, because maybe now I can focus on getting the studying I need to do done. Regret, because maybe I should’ve let this book last longer. And the sinking feeling because I immediately knew I would be fighting the urge to buy the next book and start reading it straight away.

And I was right! Obviously I needed to read the next one, so keep an eye out for that review in the coming days!

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this review, next week I will be reviewing the third instalment of the Time for Alexander series, Son of the Moon, by Jennifer Macaire. Continue to read further down to find out about the author.

Author Bio

Kristin Ward has loved writing since middle school but took thirty years to do something serious about it. The result is her Best Indie Book Award-winning novel, After the Green Withered, followed by the sequel, Burden of Truth. She lives in a small town in Connecticut with her husband, three sons, and many furry and feathered friends. A SciFi geek to the core, she is fueled by dark chocolate and coffee and can be heard quoting eighties movies on a regular basis.