I have two major problems with this book: the world building, and Aria's mother, Lumina.

The world building? No. Lame. Everything that could have been interesting was fluffed over and everything boring as fuck was foisted on us for around 75% of the story, a very large part of this being made up of a bunch of people walking through the woods.

Aria is banished from her home Reverie, forced to leave the safety of the pods to the Outside - a futuristic vision of the world scorched and burned, reduced to ashes by devastating Aether storms (some sort of electrical storm? With a tornado element? Was it raining fire? I don't know. Does anyone?) Anxious to find her way home and discover the whereabouts of her long lost mother, Aria meets Perry, an Outsider, who is desperately seeking his nephew kidnapped by scientific researchers of the pods. They form an uneasy alliance when they realise they need each other to reach their goals. And because this is YA, naturally they fall for each other.

I wished I'd been informed before I began reading Under The Never Sky that a huge portion of the book is dedicated to describing Perry and Aria's wilderness survival adventure. I live downtown. I like being surrounded by concrete and solid buildings and people. I'm also a vegetarian so I have absolutely no desire to read about trekking through woodland, slicing creatures throats open (Aria stabs a goddam badger for fucks sake!! Like honestly? No. This kind of thing? Not for me) and building fires and how to tell poisonous berries apart from non-poisonous berries? Stop, Veronica Rossi. Just stop.

This not only came across as so boring I wanted to eat my face, but also kinda smelled like some really lazy world building. Instead of having us explore the inside of the pods, which would have been far more interesting, giving us a glimpse of Rossi's ideas for futuristic technology and how these pods would manage to maintain self sufficiency, we were treated to a cross country hike. We already have woods in this life. We have trees, we have goddam lakes and grass and shit - give us something new to read about!! I love anything set in the future because there really is the chance for the author to let their imagination go wild. I love hearing about people's different ideas of what could exist and their interpretation of what society may become. This is what I was expecting from Under The Never Sky - not historical fiction, which is what it wound up feeling like with all the bows and arrows, wolf skin clothing, stone cottages and whatnot. It was like reading about goddam medieval times with their fucking deer roasting over a damn spit. There's nothing fresh or surprising about the world Rossi has created. It's just Generic Ye Olde Village, populated with a few people who can smell things really well.