Hello everyone!
I'm back with another book review, today it is The Treatment by Suzanne Young.
The story picks right up where we left off in book one. Obviously, this review will contain spoilers for book one, so avert your eyes now! Sloane and James are on the run and have met up with rebels against The Program. There is a lot of safe-house jumping and trying to outsmart The Program. The pair struggles with trying to figure out their past and they soon begin to question who they can really trust. Realm begins to cause issues, stirring up trouble and creating tension with James. As alliances are questioned and The Program looming, Sloane and James have to find a way to figure out who is lying and who is telling the truth about The Program, and it's true intentions.
As with the first book, we see a lot of interactions with Sloane and James. While the reader knows their true past, they still don't know what their lives were like before The Program. It was interesting to see them and their relationship grow. I will say this, Young can write a great romance. From the first book, there was a bit of concern of a codependent relationship between them, stemming from their trauma. While this issue is addressed briefly in the first book, you can really see the strength of their relationship in this book.
Plot-wise, I thought the story was well done. There was definitely a lot going on, sometimes it almost felt like there was a bit too much going on? Either way, I enjoyed the emphasis on the action and not just the relationship between Sloane and James. There were definitely a lot of twists, many of which I had forgotten in the years since I'd first read this book. There were a lot of betrayals and senseless acts of violence that also pulled at the heartstrings.
Despite the action, I think I was expecting just a bit more. The final wrap up was pretty quick, especially considering the global scale of this 'epidemic' and it's 'treatment.' While I appreciated that there was an epilogue, I feel like it just wasn't enough to fully encompass the extent of the horrors presumably thousands, if not millions of young people endured. I know there are more books in/related to these two and thus there is more room to explain what happened in greater depth, but I just felt like things were tied up too easily in the end of this book.
Overall, I did generally enjoy this book and I am looking forward to the rest of the series.