When Ruby is ten, all the kids around her start dying of a
mysterious illness. The government responds by rounding up the surviving kids
and putting them in “rehabilitation” camps. Fast forward six years and Ruby is
still trapped in Thurmond, which she’s realized is a concentration camp for
children and teens who have developed powers after the outbreak. She has
survived so far by getting herself labeled as having a low-level ability, but
when the camp discovers she actually possesses a more dangerous ability, she
needs to run.
Upon escaping Thurmond Ruby meets other teens with abilities who
are on the run toward East River, a supposed safe haven for people like them. With
bounty hunters called Skip Tracers on their tail, they make a break for safety.
All the while, Ruby hides her true power from these other kids because she
doesn’t know how to control it, or if it can be controlled at all.
This book has been on my TBR list since February, and I
finally got around to reading it. I don’t know why I waited so long! I couldn’t
put it down and wound up reading it in one day. There’s a bit of world-building
at the beginning (while I wouldn’t really classify this book as dystopian/post-apocalyptic,
the US as we know it has changed) with the illness and the camp that slows the
story down a tiny bit, but it’s necessary to the plot. Once Ruby is on the run,
however, the story immediately picks up, and I was hooked from there until the
last page. In a strange way, THE DARKEST MINDS is a road trip book. Ruby and
her new friends (Liam, Chubs and Zu) cruise through West Virginia and Virginia
in a huge beat-up van christened Black Betty, dodging the skip tracers who want
to bring them back to the camps they escaped from.
My favorite parts of the book were anytime these four kids
were together (which, thankfully, was the majority of the book). Each character
has a distinct personality: Liam is the leader with endless stores of
positivity and telekinesis; Chubs is suspicious, a little grouchy, and loves to
read; and Zu does not speak a word in the entire book but her personality is as
powerful as the electricity that comes out of her hands. The scene where Ruby
meets them is intense and hilarious at the same time.
For me, Liam is one of the best parts of this story. It’s
nice to see a genuinely nice guy in a book, one who’s not overly mysterious and
brooding (though Liam does have his baggage). He’s possibly my favorite male YA
character I’ve read so far this year (and that’s saying a lot, considering I
was introduced to Captain Carswell Thorne of the Lunar Chronicles this year,
too!). I enjoyed Ruby’s character a lot too, and I thought she had some great
character development. In the beginning, she was extremely helpless, unable to stand
up to a guard who unfairly punished her, but by the end of this book she was
facing down some pretty serious bad guys and defending her friends. You go
girl!
If you’re normally off-put by supernatural-type abilities, I
would still recommend giving this book a try. The characters are so well
written and the world is similar enough to ours that it doesn’t feel
alienating. For me, this book is everything I wanted SHATTER ME to be and more.
SO MUCH MORE! I can’t wait to start NEVER FADE and for IN THE AFTERLIGHT to
come out this fall. There’s also a novella, IN TIME, that comes between the
first and second books which I highly recommend. I am turning into a huge Alexandra
Bracken fan. She knows how to write a story that will keep me flipping pages! Plus, the three book titles make a sentence: The darkest minds never fade in the afterlight. How clever is she?
Have you read THE DARKEST MINDS? Are you in love with this
series (and Liam)? No spoilers about NEVER FADE, please, but I’d love to hear
your thoughts!
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