Review: Initiation by Rebecca Royce

Initiation by Rebecca Royce

Publisher: Decadent Publishing
Genre: Young Adult Urban Fantasy


Heat Rating: 1

Blurb

My name is Rachel Clancy. Thirty years before I was born, the world ended. Unlike my father, I’ve never lived above ground; I’ve never seen the real sun.

On her sixteenth birthday, Rachel Clancy is sent upwards to the surface of the earth, a place most human beings will live their lives without ever knowing. But Rachel is different, special—even if she doesn’t see it. Sent on her first journey, Rachel will discover things are not as she was led to believe they would be. Not only can she fall in love, hard, with a cute blond werewolf, but also sometimes there are just as many monsters at home as there are in the wilderness.


Dodie's Review

Rachel Clancy is the teenager I wished I was. She's strong, determined, dedicated, and loyal. She's been dealt a hand from a bad deck of cards. The known world ended forty - six years ago, forcing everyone to live below ground. Now, on her sixteenth birthday, Rachel is to go up, and outside, in an attempt to battle the darkness.

There's very little else I can say about Rachel and the people in her world without giving some of the plot away, and I don't want to do this at all. This book surprised me at every turn. Each time I thought I knew what was going to happen, what happened was different, and better than what I predicted. The thing I like best about Rebecca Royce's books is how fully formed her characters and their worlds are. Even in very short works, she presents her characters to us as whole people, and with brief descriptive phrases really fleshes them out. In Initiation, the book is set in the future in a community that lives underground, called a habitat. Rebecca Royce seamlessly incorporates the history of the habitat and the difficulty of living underground into the backgrounds of the characters. For example, one person's father died of lung disease because the air filtration systems did not properly clean the air when people first moved underground. This is not an isolated incident, this level of attention to detail is continued throughout the book.

As I neared the end of the book, as I finished each chapter, I kept checking to make sure that there was more book to read. I was on the edge of my seat until the very end, and I am anxiously awaiting the next book in this series to be published. I can't wait to see how Rachel overcomes the obstacles that Rebecca Royce puts in her way.

5 Tea Cups and a Recommended Read!