Melanie is a ten-year-old girl who loves school. Every morning, Sergeant comes to collect her for class, and he keeps his gun pointed at her the whole time. She jokes that she won’t bite, but no one laughs. You might be able to guess what the story is about just from these sentences, and I must admit, it’s a unique and very fun premise.
The first half of the book is gripping, exciting, and genuinely hard to put down. There’s great world building, interesting characters, and the perspective of the story feels new, even if you’ve read a lot of post-apocalyptic stories. However, the later parts of the book go in a strange direction. The character development seems to halt and the plot takes some weird twists and turns. As a result, the story doesn’t quite explore the premise as much as it could’ve, and I am struggling to imagine where they could go in the rest of this book series.
If the whole story had stuck with the premise in the first half, this is a 5-star book for sure. But as it is, it falls just a bit shy of greatness.
