Book #77 Pure by Julianna Baggott

Pure

At the time of the "Detonations", Pressia Bellze was aged 6 and on the outside, a hot white light came and the doll she had in her hand, became her hand. Partridge Willux, son of a government official, had a place inside the Dome, and has remained unharmed and Pure.

Outside the Dome, the "wretches" were told they would be helped, eventually, but 10 years have passed, and no help has come, they live in fear of a brutal regime, but the regime within the safe, clean Dome is no less sinister.

Pure is another young adult dystopian novel, in the vein of the Hunger Games or Chaos Walking trilogies by Suzanne Collins and Patrick Ness respectively, the theme like those novels is of earnest, persistent strong young people fighting an unjust system. It also has shades of Justin Cronin's The Passage in its tone and delivery.

The imagery is inventive and arresting, original in its choices, particularly with the variety of fusions on display. Deliberate parallels are drawn to the real life events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a brave new world imagined from a global scale similar disaster. There are some holes in the plot, and unanswered questions, mainly unbelievable coincidences, lucky escapes that wouldn't occur and bizarre failure to properly act on extensive surveillance, but it is by no means a fishnet. 

It has the obligatory teen romance, which for both couples really feels a little weak and there by force, as though the publisher requested it to line it up with the current trend, and sometimes the dialogue is a bit Famous Five, they all seem to know rather a lot for, on the one hand, 2 kids with little education, and on the other, a kid with a heavily censored one. Bradwell particularly being ridiculously knowing about pre Dome history and politics for someone orphaned at the age of 9.

That said the book  as an opener to a new young adult dystopia trilogy or quartet was good, I did enjoy it, and will probably read the follow up as it comes out, if the other books I mention in this review appealed to you, this book will too 8/10