"Apprentice" by Kristen Young

This book is weird. Not in necessarily a bad way, but also not really in a good way either.

It's dystopian. The premise of the book involves a government called the Love Collective (are you weirded out yet?) who claim to promote love and peace and harmony, unlike all the "Haters" who don't constantly promote love and peace and harmony. They also brainwash people, because they're dystopian.

Allow me to point something out. When you're living in a dystopia and you suddenly realize "hey, this is a dystopia" and want to get out, the expected course of action is to, y'know, not tell anyone while you try to figure out how to escape. It builds tension quite easily. Such is the plot of Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, The Sky Inside, the first book of Vega Jane, everybody's lives in Nazi Germany and the USSR... In fact, the one thing you don't do is go around saying seditious things to people.

Our main character, Kerr Flick (these people have the strangest names), is seemingly unable to keep her mouth shut. She goes around saying seditious things to people, which is not generally a quality you want in a dystopia. |It very nearly gets her arrested and brainwashed near the end of the book; she's only saved by Underground Resistance Members Ex Machina.| She's also constantly angry, which does not contribute to fitting in with the other dystopia people.

For whatever reason, the Love Collective has decided that normal names are for other people. We have people named things like "Buff" and "Pim" and "Freb". I think the most normal name in the entire book is "Lee".

My pseudonymous acquaintance Kittens warned me that this book was really weird. Having read it, I can now confirm that she told me so.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence.

2 stars. It's not that the book is bad, exactly, it's just really weird and I don't like the protagonist very much, and I mostly finished it because I wanted to find out what the heck was up with this universe. Which, hey, that did keep me reading, so the author must have done something right. I was originally going to give it three stars until I failed to force myself to read the second book, and realized that I actually disliked reading it. Hence, two stars.

(Endnote: No, monsieur. For loooooooove.)