Review: intense follow up to broken city
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 13, 2014
****I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.****BROKEN TRUCE was released three years after the first book, BROKEN CITY, and I could tell the difference in Chant's plotting. The story and characters have grown exponentially from the first book, and there's much more action with intense moments in this installment of the series.What I likedI really liked the plot of BROKEN TRUCE with all of the action and intensity. The synopsis gives away very little as to what happens in this book, and I was taken by surprise in the best way possible. In writing this review, I decided I should stick with how the book made me feel and what I thought about it rather than possibly giving any of the plot away, especially if you haven't read book one yet. Let's just say I was invested in the plot and needed to know what would happen next.Many of the characters have grown on me, including Deeta and Tom. I warmed up to both of them much more this time around, and I think part of that is they've become familiar to me and understand their personalities and ways of thinking better. I even began liking Jayden, one of the Andak brothers, and hoping for more scenes with him. He's brave in wanting to do the right thing even if he has to stand up to his brothers to get it done. I admire that about him.What didn't work for meAs with the first book, BROKEN TRUCE also has many spelling and grammatical errors. The biggest mistakes I ran into were run-on sentences and misuse of pronouns (ex. using "you're" instead of "your"). I don't usually comment on this sort of thing because I mostly review ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies) which have kinks to be worked out before being published for sale, and this book is an ARC. However, the first book had these types of mistakes, too, and it has been out for three years which is plenty of time to fix these issues.There are quite a few shifts in POV in BROKEN TRUCE. There's Deeta's POV in first person and Tom's POV in third person, which was also the case with the first book. Again, I found myself wishing Tom's POV was also in first person. Unlike the first book, BROKEN TRUCE has several different characters' POV's, which ended up confusing me at times. They're all in third person, too. It ended up making the story a bit jarring plus gave me a lot of characters to keep track of without much to help me differentiate them from one another - mostly, the Andak brothers.OverallThe only two issues keeping me from giving BROKEN TRUCE a higher rater than three stars are the grammar/spelling and multiple POV's. The plot is excellent, and the action kept me excited enough to want to keep reading. The characters have grown since the first book, and they've grown on me as well. This series is a different kind of dystopian than anything I've read before, and I think if you want to read a post-apocalyptic, dystopian novel without plagues or zombies, then give this series a try.