A blatant Hunger Games clone with nothing new to offer. The pacing is all over the place, I hate the prose, and every antagonist is cartoonishly evil. There is no depth or developments for any character, especially Darrow. There is nothing gained from the plot of this book, except that our Mary Sue-esque main character won the prize. It makes so much sense that the author was a polisci major, but that’s not a compliment. There is a time towards the end of the book where Darrow says that maybe not all Golds are bad, but this is not earned as he never saw a Gold being good to someone of a lower class. Anyway, I’ll still be reading the next book as this one was entertaining enough.
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