Under The Never Sky by Veronica Rossi

Under The Never Sky by Veronica Rossi
Buy Under The Never Sky by Veronica Rossi at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Teens
Reviewer: Robert James
Summary: Slow start and a romance which didn't really grip me left me a little underwhelmed by this one. Worth checking out if you're a big fan of dystopian novels though.
Buy? Maybe	Borrow? Maybe
Pages: 336	Date: February 2012
Publisher: Atom
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9781907411052
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Aria lives in the dome of Reverie, where she has pretty much everything she ever wanted. By travelling the Realms, she can find entertainment in a host of different settings, meet up with friends, and generally live a life of luxury. But when a real world excursion goes horribly wrong, and she's left to take the blame for someone else's mistake, she finds herself cast out into the dangers of the wild. Luckily for her, she meets an Outsider called Perry. He has his own reasons for needing to get into Reverie, and the two form an uneasy alliance.

I found this one rather slow to get going, to be honest, and the dialogue didn't help much - there's only so many times I can read exchanges with people calling each other 'Mole' and 'Savage' without rolling my eyes inwardly. I also thought it took much too long to give a clear explanation of Perry's special abilities and to fill in some world-building as to what the people outside the domes were really like - frustratingly, the revelation about Perry's abilities was extremely well written when we finally got to it, but I'd almost lost interest by that part. I warmed to the two main characters a bit as I went through the book, but wasn't too convinced by the way their relationship developed. Yes, the way they travelled together for some time was very different from the cliched 'love at first sight' that seems to occur so often in this type of book, but it seemed just as unrealistic in its own way. They seemed to go from not particularly liking each other to madly in love far too quickly, and it left me struggling to care about them all that much. The supporting cast, on the other hand, was well developed and I particularly liked the youngster Cinder.

Even though I didn't particularly enjoy this one I certainly wouldn't say it was a bad book. Despite the slow start, there was a point towards the middle when the world-building was really drawing me in, and I'll probably check out the next in the series in the hope that we get to find out more about the world and that with the characters established, it's a bit pacier. That said, I'm struggling to give this one much of a recommendation since there's a ton of similar books out there which I personally preferred.

The standard dystopian recommendation these days seems to be The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, but there's a good reason for that - it's superb. Delirium by Lauren Oliver is another one that genre fans will really enjoy.

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