Going on vacation, and I’m gonna have a good time!

Happy Friday!

I am mere hours away from my first week long vacation since I began at ACR Homes three and a half years ago.  To celebrate, I have a new book review for you today!

The Unidentified, by Rae Mariz.

In a future where the government ran out of money, and sold the education system to businesses, Katey Dade, known by her friends as Kid, attempts to navigate her way through the corporate sponsorship filled halls of high school.

Her days are normal, using VR to learn about equations, playing up to the sponsors in hopes of getting branded, watching friends in the skate park to learn about physics, watching a shadowy figure drop a dummy five stories to the quad below.

Oh.  Wait.

None of those things are remotely normal, and even in a universe where the education system had been privatized and owned by corporations, there is no way in a million years did I ever believe any of this would fly.

So, more plot.  The dummy had a sign: UNIDENTIFIED. CHOOSE YOUR SIDE. Kid spends the majority of the book trying to figure out who Unidentified is, and though her search beings to realize what a load of crap their whole lifestyle is.

I have definite mixed feelings about this book. 

The writing, for the most part, was engaging.  Besides the highly stylized setting, the characters felt real, felt like they were saying and thinking things real people would say.  I was interested in where the characters would go, and I still kind of what to know where Kid went with her major side arc.

However, the stylized setting was really off-putting.  The mass commercialization of their entire lives felt over the top, and honestly?  A sane person would put a halt to those shenanigans immediately.  One of the more obnoxious writing choices was the decision to put the ® symbol after each *fake* product name.  It really rankled after the first four or five times, because really?  A person doesn’t think like that, and this book was written in first person, so the vast majority of it was in her head. 

All in all, this book was engaging, but there are some severe flaws that can really hamper your enjoyment of the book.

Rating: 3/5 Falling dummies