The Testing by Joelle Charbonneau

The Testing by Joelle Charbonneau
Buy The Testing by Joelle Charbonneau at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Teens
Reviewer: Robert James
Summary: Despite strong similarities to a certain other dystopian novel, this is well worth reading thanks to a fantastic heroine and a brilliant conclusion.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 384	Date: August 2013
Publisher: Templar Publishing
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-1848776531
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I'll break from my usual reviewing style of starting off with a plot summary here, for reasons which will shortly become obvious, and just start by saying The Testing is an interesting dystopian read, with a wonderful narrator, which I'd definitely recommend.

So, that plot summary. Some time after a war has ravaged the world, the post-war government has created a system of colonies. Taken from her home colony, along with a male teen as a love interest, our resourceful heroine is thrown into a situation where a bunch of teenagers are forced to try and kill each other in order to survive. With mutated animals to deal with, as well as the government she'd always thought was trustworthy but now is starting to doubt, can Malencia win out?

Okay, to say this owes a lot to The Hunger Games would be putting it mildly. Having said that, there's been an awful lot of stuff published recently which owes a lot to the Hunger Games, and this succeeds where the vast majority of the rest has left me cold. The major plus points The Testing has are a fantastic narrator in Cia and the way we're introduced to her world, with the author doing her world-building with great skill. It also stands out as surprisingly brutal, even compared to many of the other dystopians out there today.

It's not five star - for a start, some character motivations seem seriously weird; why on earth are the government willing to wipe out so many promising youngsters? Additionally, there's a slow start which meant it took 50 pages or so to hook me. It is, however, significantly better than most in the genre, has got one of my favourite heroines of the last twelve months, and features what's quickly becoming the Holy Grail of teen series for me. Yes, it has a cliffhanger ending that actually works perfectly - a few months after reading it, I'm still stunned by how brilliantly Charbonneau set up the next in the sequence.

As stated earlier, definitely recommended for fans of dystopian fiction.

The obvious one is, as mentioned above, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Another fabulous dystopian trilogy is Delirium by Lauren Oliver and its sequels.

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