Hello everyone!
I am back with another book review, The Rule of One by Ashley Saunders and Leslie Saunders. Thanks so much to Thomas Allen for sending me a copy of this book for an honest review, as always, all opinions are my own.
This book is set in a near-future America where the population had gotten so massive that the government had to install a one-child policy. Ava, the daughter of a prominent Texas doctor, has shared her life - half her days in the world have been her own, the other half have been her twin sister, Mira - living secretly as her sister. There secret, however, is soon found out and the twins run away to save themselves and their father, who has been captured and is being tried for treason.
While that all may sound interesting to some (myself included) there wasn't much else to the book beyond that. This felt like a very surface level story where none of the characters or the story itself were really fleshed out. There were multiple times where I forgot what the girls looked like, it wasn't until some line about "the flash of amber hair" that I remembered. I just couldn't picture them, or most of the story, and I think that, ultimately, led to my indifference towards this book.
The story is told from each twin's perspective but aside from the times when they were separated, it pretty much read as a singular third-person narrative. There was almost no difference between narration and if you forced me to decide which chapter was from which POV, I'd be hard-pressed to give you the correct answer.
I think my biggest problem that encompasses my issues with this book is that the dystopian/post-apocalyptic/near-future genre is SO saturated, it's incredibly hard to come up with an original idea. In the end, this book just felt like a patchwork of better dystopian novels stuck together. I think this is ultimately why I wasn't able to get into the story - because I had read better versions of it multiple times over already.
Overall, this was a surface level story that is a collection of dystopian tropes and ideas, under the guise of a new government policy idea - was not a fan.
This book is set in a near-future America where the population had gotten so massive that the government had to install a one-child policy. Ava, the daughter of a prominent Texas doctor, has shared her life - half her days in the world have been her own, the other half have been her twin sister, Mira - living secretly as her sister. There secret, however, is soon found out and the twins run away to save themselves and their father, who has been captured and is being tried for treason.
While that all may sound interesting to some (myself included) there wasn't much else to the book beyond that. This felt like a very surface level story where none of the characters or the story itself were really fleshed out. There were multiple times where I forgot what the girls looked like, it wasn't until some line about "the flash of amber hair" that I remembered. I just couldn't picture them, or most of the story, and I think that, ultimately, led to my indifference towards this book.
The story is told from each twin's perspective but aside from the times when they were separated, it pretty much read as a singular third-person narrative. There was almost no difference between narration and if you forced me to decide which chapter was from which POV, I'd be hard-pressed to give you the correct answer.
I think my biggest problem that encompasses my issues with this book is that the dystopian/post-apocalyptic/near-future genre is SO saturated, it's incredibly hard to come up with an original idea. In the end, this book just felt like a patchwork of better dystopian novels stuck together. I think this is ultimately why I wasn't able to get into the story - because I had read better versions of it multiple times over already.
Overall, this was a surface level story that is a collection of dystopian tropes and ideas, under the guise of a new government policy idea - was not a fan.