Review ~ Pure ~ Julianna Baggott

Title: Pure

Author: Julianne Baggott

Published: Feb 8th 2012

By: Hatchette

From: netgalley

First line: There was a low droning a week or so after the detonations; time was hard to track.

Last line: And then the cindered wood starts to shiver in that spot and one by one, the black boxes pull themselves up from the char.

Synopsis: We know you are here, our brothers and sisters . . .
Pressia barely remembers the Detonations or much about life during the Before. In her sleeping cabinet behind the rubble of an old barbershop where she lives with her grandfather, she thinks about what is lost-how the world went from amusement parks, movie theaters, birthday parties, fathers and mothers . . . to ash and dust, scars, permanent burns, and fused, damaged bodies. And now, at an age when everyone is required to turn themselves over to the militia to either be trained as a soldier or, if they are too damaged and weak, to be used as live targets, Pressia can no longer pretend to be small. Pressia is on the run.

Burn a Pure and Breathe the Ash . . .
There are those who escaped the apocalypse unmarked. Pures. They are tucked safely inside the Dome that protects their healthy, superior bodies. Yet Partridge, whose father is one of the most influential men in the Dome, feels isolated and lonely. Different. He thinks about loss-maybe just because his family is broken; his father is emotionally distant; his brother killed himself; and his mother never made it inside their shelter. Or maybe it's his claustrophobia: his feeling that this Dome has become a swaddling of intensely rigid order. So when a slipped phrase suggests his mother might still be alive, Partridge risks his life to leave the Dome to find her.

When Pressia meets Partridge, their worlds shatter all over again.

I’m huge fan of anything dystopian/post-apocalyptic and so this seemed like the perfect choice for me, indeed there was a lot about this book that I really wanted to like. When I started reading I did take a liking to Pressia and Partridge and felt that there was a vulnerability about their characters that ensured you were rooting for them. Unfortunately that enthusiasm didn’t last long and by the end of the book I wasn’t quite so bothered. Some details regarding the characters, more particularly the deformities they suffer from as a result of the apocalypse are quite sinister (and indeed pretty original!) although I felt that even for me the boundaries of my imagination were being stretched too far. I think for me it was the writing style that put me off more than anything in as much as it felt like a series of stage directions with a script rather than a story. The plot was a little thin at times and the emotion the characters portrayed seemed to appear only at the surface level. That said, there may be readers who might find the style of writing punchy and may not be such big fans of the overly dramatic prose. If that is the case I would absolutely recommend this book to you. As I said at the beginning, the premise is a brilliant one, I just didn't feel it was particularly well executed. Sadly, as much as I wanted it to be this was not the book for me.

2.5/5. An excellent idea for a story, but it just wasn’t for me.