Going into this book, I was predisposed to not like it. I suppose having a book suggested to me makes me think "oh, this book was recommended by someone I know, therefore I have to pretend I like it to them, therefore I'm going to resent it and not like it". Couple that with the fact that it's dystopian fiction (which I don't tend to like), and... I wasn't super not enthused going in, but I also wasn't super enthused.
It's hard to actually describe the plot without breaking my "don't spoil anything you wouldn't find in the first few chapters [though this one doesn't really have short enough chapters for that] or the cover blurb" code and/or covering the page in |spoiler| tags. If you want a better description, go to my mom's review here. If you want to hear what I thought of it, though, stay on this page.
I spend most of the first half of my initial read-through going "gahhhHHHHhhhh why do I have to read this book for school???". Had I not been reading it for school, I probably would have just DNF'd it and chucked the whole thing into the 2-star wall incinerator, there to be wall incinerated. (Wall incinerators are a thing within the book; it's an incinerator in your wall, not an incinerator for incinerating walls.)
Thankfully, I was reading it for school, which meant I had to finish it. It gets better, sufficiently enough to rate it 4 stars; the ending was appropriately foreshadowed and yet completely unexpected, and it was good.
Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T to M, depending on how realistically you depict the violence. Leans a bit more toward the M side of the scale, in my opinion. I don't think a Fahrenheit 451 game would sell very well at all.
And that is exactly why I made you read it for school -- so you would have to finish it and discover it's awesome, not get so bogged down in the downer first half that you chucked it in the wall incinerator.
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