Starters

Starters
Lissa Price
368 pages
Publisher: Delacorte
Source: the publisher via NetGalley
★★★★★

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

When the Spore Wars kills off the adults and leaves only the children and the elderly alive, Callie is left alone with her brother, desperate to keep themselves alive during a time when no one has any respect for youth.  In order to get them out of their squalor-like living conditions, Callie signs up with a company that rents out the bodies of teenagers to the elderly who would like a chance to be energetic again.  Callie is promised a great sum of money to do so, but soon nothing is going according to plan when she wakes up and can hear her renters voice inside her own head... and her renter wants to do something a little more devious than party.

What a fabulous book!  I sincerely loved every minute.  Let me throw out a few more adjectives for you - distinctive, enticing, exciting... really I can't even begin tell you how great this book was.  The first thing that drew me in, of course, was the wickedly awesome post-apocalypic plot.  While it's inexplicable for the spores to have killed only people between 20 and 60*, this idea of biological warfare is not unfounded and there's always that slight threat that it could happen to us.  The idea that that kind of warfare could polarize a country - you have your wealthy and your poor with not too much in-between - seems like a realistic outcome.  I had real empathy for Callie in this situation - I genuinely wanted her to find peace for her and her brother.

The action didn't let me down.  Each chapter was something new and exciting, propelling the plot forward to the the fast paced, cliff-hanger ending.  I'm relieved to see the sequel, Enders, is due out in December so it won't be too long of a wait.  I'm dying to see Callie triumph!  I didn't want this book to end at all and I'm also looking forward to reading the three short stories Price has written to go along with the series.

Five stars!  This book did not bore me once and throughout the novel I kept wanting to turn the pages.  Fans of Divergent and The Hunger Games will really enjoy Starters and I think this book is going to do really well.  Starters will be released March 13, so either pre-order it now or add it to your book buying list.

*Pardon my error, it wasn't that the spores killed only those between 20 and 60, it was that the vaccine saved those under 20 and those over 60.  Thanks, Lissa, for the clarification!  I must have missed that fact in my zeal to finish the book.

2/12 Completed!