(buddy read with Hooked on Books)
The first book of the trilogy introduces us to the land of Internment: a floating piece of Earth. That element alone made me want to read this book and I was not disappointed!

 

The story takes place on this floating city, where a long list of rules are enforced to its citizens. One girl's murder will question the beliefs of our heroine Morgan, who has to deal with her own family drama.

 

The story was a bit slow in the beginning, but it was very engaging. Overall, I found the descriptions of Internment to be excellent: I could picture myself living on a floating island, where instead of water, all I could see was sky and clouds all around me. Like I said, the setting was highly intriguing and makes this book a bit more unique than all the other dystopian ones out there.

 

It wouldn't be a dystopian story, however, without the proper amount of negative elements: here is the restriction of one's freedom. You might be able to choose any career you fancy, but there are rules about how long you'll live, when you'll have children and of course with whom you will spend the rest of your life with. The edge of this "world" holds a great appeal to people who don't want to continue living like that. It sort of lures them to jump with nothing but dreadful consequences: if they don't die, they suffer from a physical impairment. (They won't land on earth and die because the winds around Internment are so strong that make them jump back up.)

 

Things will start to change when this "safe" place is no longer safe. A teenage girl is found murdered. This level of violence is highly unusual and the suspect must be found. The story's protagonist is another teenage girl, Morgan, whose brother is a jumper. He tried to jump unsuccessfully and the price he paid was his eyesight. And the edge calls to Morgan too...

"Every star has been set in the sky. We mistakenly think they were put there for us."

Every chapter begins with parts of the deceased girl's essay. She wrote about her land questioning their practices and their belief system. I loved these bits as they were very poetic: (they were also constantly highlighted, as I think most of them are general truths)

"As a child, I trusted the god in the sky with decisions like life and death. It wasn't until I began studying medicine that I learned these are decisions made by humans. Flawed humans - as though there are any other kind."

 

"With free will comes inevitable error and misjudgement."

These quotes remind me of Lauren Oliver's lyrical prose on the "Delirium" series. Lauren DeStefano's writing was almost as good as Oliver's.

I can't wait to read on these series and find out the rest of Morgan's tale..

(buddy read with Hooked on Books)

We're all living on borrowed time, on a floating city he allows in his domain with his clouds and his stars."

The first book of the trilogy introduces us to the land of Internment: a floating piece of Earth. That element alone made me want to read this book and I was not disappointed!

The story takes place on this floating city, where a long list of rules are enforced to its citizens. One girl's murder will question the beliefs of our heroine Morgan, who has to deal with her own family drama.

The story was a bit slow in the beginning, but it was very engaging. Overall, I found the descriptions of Internment to be excellent: I could picture myself living on a floating island, where instead of water, all I could see was sky and clouds all around me. Like I said, the setting was highly intriguing and makes this book a bit more unique than all the other dystopian ones out there.

It wouldn't be a dystopian story, however, without the proper amount of negative elements: here is the restriction of one's freedom. You might be able to choose any career you fancy, but there are rules about how long you'll live, when you'll have children and of course with whom you will spend the rest of your life with. The edge of this "world" holds a great appeal to people who don't want to continue living like that. It sort of lures them to jump with nothing but dreadful consequences: if they don't die, they suffer from a physical impairment. (They won't land on earth and die because the winds around Internment are so strong that make them jump back up.)

Things will start to change when this "safe" place is no longer safe. A teenage girl is found murdered. This level of violence is highly unusual and the suspect must be found. The story's protagonist is another teenage girl, Morgan, whose brother is a jumper. He tried to jump unsuccessfully and the price he paid was his eyesight. And the edge calls to Morgan too...

"Every star has been set in the sky. We mistakenly think they were put there for us."

Every chapter begins with parts of the deceased girl's essay. She wrote about her land questioning their practices and their belief system. I loved these bits as they were very poetic: (they were also constantly highlighted, as I think most of them are general truths)

"As a child, I trusted the god in the sky with decisions like life and death. It wasn't until I began studying medicine that I learned these are decisions made by humans. Flawed humans - as though there are any other kind."

"With free will comes inevitable error and misjudgement."

These quotes remind me of Lauren Oliver's lyrical prose on the "Delirium" series. Lauren DeStefano's writing was almost as good as Oliver's.
I can't wait to read on these series and find out the rest of Morgan's tale..

First off, the covers for this series are just gorgeous! But what I fell in love with the most, was the concept -a floating city in the sky where you can be anything you want to be as long as you follow one rule. Don't go close to the edge!

 

The world building was really unique and well thought out. I enjoyed learning about the city of Internment and the society that they live in. The main characters were also really likable and I even enjoyed the romance between Morgan & Basil. The story though was a little slow moving and I felt like it was just missing that extra spark to make it a 5 star read for me. I also found several grammatical errors which I was very surprised by since this series is contracted under a well known publisher. I've been going back and forth on whether or not to rate this 3.5 or 4 stars. The ending though was very good and really what finally pushed me over to 4 stars. Either way, I am definitely going to continue the series. I am thoroughly invested in the characters and want to see how the story plays out for them.

 

*I want to again thank my blind valentine, Rachel the Book Harlot, for this wonderful gift which allowed me to escape to an amazing floating city in the sky for a few hours! 

Bring on book 2!
Mostly because the ending left me hanging so awful.... gawd.
I've read good and bad reviews for this one before I read it, and I feel I fall in the middle somewhere. I liked the setting, kinda neat to think this other place but not planet living in the sky. Even cooler is how they got off this place. But somehow I still wasn't wowed or fell in love with the story. Maybe the next book, with my body off the cliff, I might get into it more. I'm willing to try anyway.
Sci-fi or dystopian fans will probably devour this one. The strange setting is enough to pull a curious reader in, so give it a try anyway.

 

"Perfect Ruin" reminds me of post-apocalyptic/alternative reality movies, like the one with Justin Timberlake about people having a clock inside their arm that counts down how many days they have left. Just like these movies, the book offers a premise that sounds intriguing enough, leaving room for potential growth. Once I started reading it, the story was much the same way - interesting enough, building up the suspense to keep me reading and interested. But the closer I got to the end, the more I realized that perhaps that this is the very fault of the book: it comes across as interesting but nothing all too special, in some places failing to bring a satisfactory answer that would probably have been more appropriate given the circumstances. In short, it lacked that spark, that something-else quality.

I really enjoyed Morgan's character, partially because of how much I could relate to her. DeStefano did a great job, I think, in writing a character that was well-balanced, showing bravery and persistence as well as her natural faults and fears. It helped keep the story going, especially knowing her thoughts and emotions. This was true for most of the other characters I would say, and perhaps this makes "Perfect Ruin" one of the more balanced and 'realistic' books in terms of the cast out of all the YA novels I've read so far.

Where the book falters however is on premise and details, namely world building. The concept of the floating Internment is introduced in the first chapter and is then jumped around for the remainder of the book. There are no details about how this happened exactly or why, and there isn't any insight in terms of new knowledge that could appear to the characters. As a result they're still in the dark, but at least they are going along with it and fighting against the system, unlike the slightly confused reader who's trying to keep track of everything. There are occasional bursts of details, like when Morgan recollects that in the past people with lighter hair and eye colours belonged to royalty, or how there used to be castles. These information 'leaks' occur sporadically and are like lose threads that simply accumulated. I wish there was more information on why tennis was called "plum", or what exactly "soapberries" were, and just how the knowledge of common English words like "alcohol" or architecture was lost. I did like the stories from the History of Internment, especially the one about the twin girls. It did a good job in showing the mentality of the new world, whether intentionally or without realizing it. Otherwise, many of the details of Internment were standard elements of a utopian-based society, such as pairing up couples, eliminating people who are "defective", and having a set age for when people must die. There wasn't an explanation for why there was a king, which was one of the details that I was really interested about throughout the entire novel.

One of my favourite details was the use of the quotes from the essay of Daphne Leander. They did a good job in setting the overall tone for the story and helping maintain the consistency throughout. As mentioned before, the plot itself is quite good, and does enough to maintain suspense and interest, but it is unanswered questions, like the strange and giddy behavior of Pen, especially in the scene where she's talking about her drawing, that take their toll over time as they add up. The ending also doesn't give much insight as to where the story might go, probably being the only neutral cliffhanger I've seen in a series, especially in the first book.

I look forward to seeing where the rest of the series will go. I enjoyed the sensory experience of the train most of all, and the atmosphere of darkness, isolation, and stars that entranced me. I hope more of the mythology of Internment and the sky god will be explored, and that the next part of the series will have slightly more of a kick to it. There was something missing in this one. Perhaps it's the small but still noticeable holes in details. Many probably won't be satisfied with the slow and steady pacing of the book, but for me that was another plus. It read like a fairytale, without rushing on an adrenaline wave the way "The Hunger Games" and similar books were. It was an interesting, pleasant, and somewhat strange read that I'm not quite sure what to think of.