Dystopian future in a usa dominated by religion

With the main characters in this book being teenagers, it would be quite easy to overlook this book as being just another book in a dystopian YA series, but that would be underestimating the scope of it.

This book does not go into much detail of the nature and extent of the disaster that has resulted in the usa having been rebuilt in a fairly fascist and extremely conservative christian image, the focus is more about building a picture of the current state of that country rather than what caused it to exist.

The main character is a teenage girl called Rebecca who has caught the attention of a recruiter for a shadowy re-education camp called Second Salvations and this book is predominantly about how she ends up at that camp, while also introducing us to a lesser extent to Daniel who has similarly attracted the attention of this recruiter and he seems likely to increase in prominence in subsequent books.

It says quite a bit about the nature of the country established in this book that Rebecca's fairly ineffectual attempt to avoid being taken to Second Salvations managed to gain her such a level of notoriety, clearly very little rebellion is tolerated there now.

I am not familiar with the narrator of this book, but thought that she gave a strong performance for the main character and enough variation on the supporting cast as needed, nicely bringing to life the book as a whole.

One thing I didn't like about this book very much was the opening which was a flash-forward to an action scene as if the author did not feel enough confidence in the pace of the opening chapters getting to that point in a more linear fashion and thus resorted to this needless gimmick. However, this did not detract too much from my overall enjoyment of a strong first book in this series and I would definitely consider looking out for subsequent ones.

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