Review: Really enjoyed
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 1, 2014
The Wicked We Have Done, Chaos Theory #1, by Sarah HarianGrade: B“The Compass Room sees who you truly are, despite the lies you tell yourself.”Evelyn Ibarra’s life was going great. She had a boyfriend that she loved, was getting ready to graduate from college and had just put together a gallery art project with her best friend Megan. Now Evelyn has been accused of being a terrorist and being a part of a mass shooting on her college campus that killed many including Megan. Now ten months later Evelyn has been sentenced to the Compass Room with five other people to see which of them is morally corrupt and which are not. The Compass Room is very controversial and those it finds guilty it kills on the spot but those who survive the month long process are allowed to go free. Evelyn is now fighting for her life but facing the horrible situation that landed her in the first place.I had no idea what exactly the Compass Room was but I was intrigued with the idea of a girl being sent to a prison that judges through emotions or hormones if she is guilty or not. I struggled through the first few chapters but very quickly I was sucked into this new, violent and mind blowing world. One of the things that I had to get used to was the flipping back and forth between time periods which confused me at first. I will be honest that at first I felt that this was very much like the “hunger Games” due to the fact that we have young college age kids being put into a simulation that is controlled by people watching and they are fighting for their lives. There are a lot of differences but when first reading this was the comparison that I made.I really liked Evelyn and found her to embody everything that I love in a female lead: strong, smart and willing to fight for those she cares about. Evelyn can be very confusing at times about her story and of course it takes a while to find out what really happened to land her in the Compass Room. There are a nine other people in the Compass Room with Evelyn and it was difficult to read at times because I started to really like some of these characters and I knew some of them were not going to live. As I mentioned before once I got into the story I couldn’t put it down because I had to know who was going to survive and what they were going to have to go through to do so.I had some ups and downs with this book. Mos of my downs were due to how violent and dark it was and the fact that everyone in the Compass Room was so young. I like the premise a lot but was disappointed that the book ends with a cliffhanger and I don’t know what happens until Fall 2014. I think that since this book has so many similarities to the Hunger Games and is so dark and violent some won’t like it but I did and plan on continuing with the series because I have to know what happens next.