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The Hunger Games meets a climate-ravaged watery corporate-capitalist nightmare world.
A love letter to the 2010s YA dystopians I grew up on.

I have to say I am kind of disappointed. I wasn’t a huge fan of Lady Macbeth and was hoping this would return to Reid’s earlier works - a dark study of characters and society. Instead, this felt so familiar in a mediocre way.

Inesa lives in a half-sunken town trying to keep afloat (figuratively and literally) alongside her brother. However, everything changes when her mother enters her into the Gauntlet to pay off her debts. She is to be hunted down by Caerus’s Angels - weapons created by the corporation that controls everything through their credit system.

Melinoë is a Caerus assassin, trained to track and kill the sacrificial Lambs. She is a living weapon, human parts, hormones, and reconditioning. She will do anything to avoid the being decommissioned and Wiped to become a corporate concubine.

This is very different to what Reid has written previously. Less horror and folklore dark, and more dystopian trauma.
This is blatantly a story about the horrors of climate change, wealth inequality, corporatocracy, and technology; made all the more scary by the reality.

"The world can break anything," she says.
"Then maybe no one has ever really been in love," I suggest dryly. "Maybe you have too much faith in people."

Caerus uses the Gauntlets to keep New Amsterdam both riveted and cowed. Entertained and subjugated. They promise advancement, but through restriction and subjugation.

I think the blurb basically tells you the entire story. What is on the package is what you get, so there wasn’t as much tension and stress which is what you want with a story like this.

This sounds all negative - it shouldn’t be. I binged this in under 3 hours and I think Reid made very valiant points about humanity’s future and our attitude. It was just very guessable. More young adult than I had thought it would be. It also lacks Reid’s also usual beautiful, stunning prose.

Thank you to the publisher for providing me an arc in exchange for a review.