To fight.
To kill.
To survive.
The Murder Complex controls us all.
It decides who lives.
It decides who dies.
I will live.
I have to.
My name is Meadow Woodson.
Author: Lindsay Cummings
Series: The Murder Complex
Standing: Book 1
Setting: Florida (future)
POV: first person, by Meadow and Zephyr, present tense
Genre: YA dystopian thriller
Reading: first time
Rating: 3 stars
Blurb:
An action-packed, blood-soaked, futuristic debut thriller set in a world where the murder rate is higher than the birthrate. For fans of Moira Young’s Dust Lands series, La Femme Nikita, and the movie Hanna.
Meadow Woodson, a fifteen-year-old girl who has been trained by her father to fight, to kill, and to survive in any situation, lives with her family on a houseboat in Florida. The state is controlled by The Murder Complex, an organization that tracks the population with precision.
The plot starts to thicken when Meadow meets Zephyr James, who is—although he doesn’t know it—one of the MC’s programmed assassins. Is their meeting a coincidence? Destiny? Or part of a terrifying strategy? And will Zephyr keep Meadow from discovering the haunting truth about her family?
Interesting book. I'm not quite sure what to make of it, but that could be because I've been on a fantasy streak the past month. But the concept behind it is relatively neat and straightforward.
This is one dystopian that I do not want to live in. Like, ever. I'd choose living in the Hunger Games over this one. In it, no one ever really dies due to illness, meaning everyone can technically live forever. And so to control the population, the government a) starves people off and b) introduces the Murder Complex, which selects and kills people. Don't get me wrong, this book fills the action aspect. But there's also lot of cold-blooded murders, too.
A few things that I wasn't really a fan of in the book: large margins, short chapters, constant switching back and forth between POVs, action scene descriptions, and romance aspect. I found that the large margins sort of undermined the story a bit. The actual text space of the book is a lot narrower than what I'm use to, and because of it, I was whipping through the pages one after another. I don't know, but isn't that sort of a waste of space? I'm one of those environment people, so wasted space means wasted trees. However, the author is not to blame, as they're not the ones who make book design decisions.
As for the short chapters, I'm usually fine with them. Tahereh Mafi's Shatter Me series had short chapters in it, too. But in this book, the chapters were consistently short, and they kept flipping back between Meadow and Zephyr's POV. Maybe it was just me, but I couldn't really keep up with who's POV it was, because it kept on going back and forth, back and forth. One event happens, yet it's told in five different chapters, going from Meadow to Zephyr and back again. I would have preferred just one of them making it through the entire thing before switching POV to look at the aftermath.
There was no short of action in this book. But it was a cold action, killing off one person after another. I get that it really depicts the wrongness of the Murder Complex and why it has to be stopped, but personally, I couldn't really get into it. It wasn't really my kind of book, and I'm not really into these kinds of pure dark themes.
As for the romance in it, I understood why it was there, but I also felt that it took away from the plot a little bit. Just general attraction would have sufficed. With the harsh setting of the book, the idea of love seemed a little out of place. What is love, when there is murder? But it can also be seen as: there will always be love, even there is murder. It depends on how you see it.
The book in general has a relatively good plot, and the overall themes of murder and death are well-developed. Both Meadow and Zephyr's actions are logical and straightforward, and you can relate to their situations and desperation. So if you enjoy cut-throat action (literally), gritty environments, thrillers, tough-as-nails heroine, and a big plot twist, read this book.
But overall for me, it just wasn't my kind of book. What do you guys think?
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