Matt McAvoy Book Review

Questions of love and morality feature prominently in this dystopian thriller, in a city where the National Eugenics Centre receives praise for engineering a human with perfect emotional restraint, couples face Reconditioning Therapy for falling in love, and a mysterious terrorist named Zac Zevalon seems hell bent on the destruction of state property. The Liberalists have won power over the Purists, and their agent Mercy is an Enforcer, a genetically modified female working with the State Security Force, and charged with keeping peace in the city. All is not rosy in the defeated Purist camp either, and Melody and fellow Enforcer Justice face confronting moral issues even as their love for one another develops in the shadow of the State.

Action fans will be pleased with the short chapters and fast-paced plot. I found myself going back to reread several important parts in order to understand them, yet the ideas are intelligent, based on the fears we all have of a controlling state erasing our individuality. When there is a lot going on in a futuristic novel and the reader has the added task of understanding how this new world operates, the author needs to be sure that she doesn’t add to the confusion by introducing too many threads and too many characters, too often. That is my only criticism; focus more on the main plot. Within it, Mercy and Justice did stand out for me, in addition to Zac’s past history. Many more characters and twisted plot elements were evident, however. Perhaps these will be developed in a further book of the series. Mercy and Justice inhabit an interesting world and I would have liked a little more character analysis. But is complex characterization necessarily important in dystopian fiction? Not too sure.

Gradually, I discerned what was going on in this world of stifled emotions, recreational sex, and back stories filled with the compassion that is absent in Mercy’s world. This world seems complicated but, beneath it, our essential humanity has not changed.