Rating: 3 StarsGenre: YA dystopia
Synopsis: In a world that favors light hair and discriminates dark as a means a social status, three girls growing up in three different circumstances form a friendship.
First and foremost, I am a bit torn between softening down a review for the sake of a struggling writer or just plowing through like I would for any book, popular and well-known or not. However, for the sake of the writer and the readers, I will do my best to be as honest as possible.
Let me say that this is my first time reviewing a self-published book (and one that was requested) I can say with some certainty that this book has not been professionally edited. If it has, Jade Varden you're not getting your money's worth because there are some very obvious grammar/spelling issues. There are also some transition issues. It's hard to tell how much time has passed between each scene until ages are talked about, and the scene switch itself seems to change abruptly and without notice. There definitely needs to be some indication of time passage at the beginning of each skip.
Overall, I think it that the prose itself flows pretty well, much better than some of the other YA of the same vein that I have read. I really have no complaints in that department. Also, I like that there is a focus on female friendships, which you really don't see very often for some reason. It's too bad that it feels like they're friends because of circumstance and not because they have any genuine interest in one another. They hang out, but I feel like none of them actually really knows one another until the end.
The genre is dystopia, though one wouldn't know it with soldiers walking around with breastplates and helmets. Usually dystopias are placed in the future (it took some time for me to ascertain that this story was indeed taking place in the future and not some alternate universe) and explore how the pressing issues of modern day social problems will play out if they are to continue (a.k.a global warming, materialism, genetic manipulation, government thought control etc). Somehow I don't see hair color discrimination factoring into the future since it obviously doesn't factor into the present. Personally if I was going to write about shade discrimination I would've gone for the elephant in the room, skin color, but I guess that's not some faraway future, that's reality. I mean, I guess hair color is supposed to an allegory for color discrimination, but still... something about it rubs me the wrong way.
