Review: Recommended Read!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 7, 2011
Dodie's ReviewRachel Clancy is the teenager I wished I was. She's strong, determined, dedicated, and loyal. She's been dealt a hand from a bad deck of cards. The known world ended forty - six years ago, forcing everyone to live below ground. Now, on her sixteenth birthday, Rachel is to go up, and outside, in an attempt to battle the darkness.There's very little else I can say about Rachel and the people in her world without giving some of the plot away, and I don't want to do this at all. This book surprised me at every turn. Each time I thought I knew what was going to happen, what happened was different, and better than what I predicted. The thing I like best about Rebecca Royce's books is how fully formed her characters and their worlds are. Even in very short works, she presents her characters to us as whole people, and with brief descriptive phrases really fleshes them out. In Initiation, the book is set in the future in a community that lives underground, called a habitat. Rebecca Royce seamlessly incorporates the history of the habitat and the difficulty of living underground into the backgrounds of the characters. For example, one person's father died of lung disease because the air filtration systems did not properly clean the air when people first moved underground. This is not an isolated incident, this level of attention to detail is continued throughout the book.As I neared the end of the book, as I finished each chapter, I kept checking to make sure that there was more book to read. I was on the edge of my seat until the very end, and I am anxiously awaiting the next book in this series to be published. I can't wait to see how Rachel overcomes the obstacles that Rebecca Royce puts in her way.5 Tea Cups and a Recommended Read!